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Introducta
As a big fan of Peter Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy I have been slightly let down by his recent efforts, two of which have been one shots and another a sourcebook for the above stated trilogy. Pandora’s Star has proven without a doubt Hamilton knows his science fiction and is arguably the best thing going inside the genre at the moment. This first novel of likely two parts is a well-paced space opera that is a well-crafted tapestry of plot threads.
The Setting
Man has come into an interstellar age where planets are connected via wormholes. There are no spaceships, they act very much like a door to another world, so trains are used and wires are run through to enable communication…not faster than light travel per se, just cheating Einstein. Virtually everyone lives forever and very few people die courtesy of rejuvenation and cloning. There is enough space and freedom on enough worlds to suit anyone’s ideals. It is a happy middle age for humanity. Yet some believe something is lurking in the shadows, controlling things…but they are a crazy extremist bunch out on the far fringes of humanity on a world that could never be civilized. The aliens that have been contacted have proven to be indifferent, friendly or just odd… Then an astronomer sees a pair of stars become completely enveloped there a rush is on to go investigate even though it happened thousands of years ago and ergo far, far away…and tome enough for humanity to strengthen itself to deal with a race than can envelope whole star systems. A mission is mounted and a dozen or so protagonists are thrown into what could present an end to a blissful human existence or the end of humanity for the stars are a literal Pandora’s box.
Critique
There is very little wrong with this novel (rumored to be only the first part of two novels). Hamilton does a good job of weaving a number of characters into a very coherent plot. There is intrigue and incredible world building happening hand in hand, which sometimes are conflicting concepts. There is one plot line that feels a little like padding (Mark’s) and a couple others that for much of the book leave you wondering what is the relevance…but in the case of the later two they do lead to some important revelations and cliff hangers for the following book.
Where Pandora’s Star exceeds Hamilton’s Nights Dawn trilogy is the fact that this novel gets things off to a much faster pace and doesn’t seem to sacrifice any of the set up and detail. It suffers a little bit from the surprise and shock that his first series did as he uses a number of similar concepts to fill out his worlds of the commonwealth. Not that this is a bad thing, just not a surprising thing. His use of trains as the mode of interstellar travel is very cool, though like the cover suggests spaceships do come into the forefront.
Weighing in at nearly a 1000 pages, Pandora’s Star has such density and lack of padding it rolls along very quickly. I found it tough to put down and wondered why I delayed reading this until I was on vacation.
The worst thing about Pandora’s Star is the next and final novel is not due out till 2006…which is an eternity given the ending is a complete cliffhanger.
Overall
Hamilton delivers the goods once again with smart and exciting science fiction and is one of the few modern writers I would deem among the best in the genre. If you are a fan of the genre pick this book and his first trilogy up pronto. If you are a fan of Hamilton’s you probably already picked this novel up or live under a literary rock.
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