Peter Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star is a vast novel. My conservative guess is there are at least 100 characters in this 988 page book. Sometimes, it’s a bit daunting to keep track of everyone. Not all of them have a large impact on the main story. Hamilton includes quite a bit of back-story and setup.
The setting is the Intersolar Commonwealth. On the day of the first manned Mars landing, astronauts find that they’ve been beaten to the punch by two geeky grad students who built themselves a wormhole generator that let’s them travel great distances instantaneously. Able to travel to other solar systems quickly, the human race has established a vast civilization connected by trains and communications that travel through permanently held open wormholes. At the same time that wormholes are first used, man has built himself the ability to rejuvenate, effectively making humans immortal. Every 50 years or so, each human goes back into a tank and emerges around 20 years old biologically. Smart computers and incredible technology even enable humans to store their entire memory offline, and to insert that memory into clones in the case that they are killed. Eternal life, even after death (except for the last memories that couldn’t be permanently stored in time).
Hamilton doesn’t shy away from throwing every S.F. cliché of a technological nature into the mix. Nearly unlimited power. Friendly aliens (though they mostly keep to themselves). Artificial intelligence. And so on and so forth. So much so that the technology pretty much takes this novel out of the realm of S.F. and into the realm of fantasy. And by that I mean that there really aren’t any rules in this universe. You need a force field, you got a force field. Kind of like magic, like being able to invent a swords and sorcery spell for whatever the occasion. Only here it has a technological veneer to it, so it counts as S.F.
That would be a huge distraction if the book were about the technology. But this isn’t a hard S.F. novel really. It’s space opera. Machinations by the political class. Heroicism by the many times rejuvenated astronaut who was third on Mars, now talked into a central role by the wormhole geek who ruined his moment of fame. There’s a crazy nutcase who leads a band of indoctrinated rebels against an alien Starflyer he believes has infiltrated the Commonwealth, and the bred-to-be-straitlaced chief investigator who has spent her life tracking him down for his crimes.
In the midst of all this is the real story. Two stars 1000 light-years away are enveloped in Dyson spheres, cutting off the light emanating from them. Since humans are situated on hundreds of worlds, an astronomer sets up his telescope to monitor the stars to see the gradual occlusion over a year or two. Only thing is, it turns out the disappearance of the stars is instantaneous. Meaning a vast force-field now surrounds each star. Speculation is that the stars either put up the force field to ward off hostile forces, or something sealed the stars up to imprison their inhabitants. The Commonwealth decides to send a ship to investigate.
Now, I should mention that the one rule enforced in this book is that the wormhole gateways cannot span more than a few tens of light years in distance with human technology. And given they haven’t needed it, mankind’s exploratory spaceship technology has never been built up. Why bother when you can just open a portal to your destination?
So the Second Chance scoutship, captained by the last person alive who traveled via spaceship (the aforementioned astronaut) travels across the galaxy at faster than the speed of light through some sort of wormhole powered method. When they get there, the force field shuts down. And the aliens inside, suddenly freed, immediately attack the ship, capturing several humans in the process. And now it knows it is not alone. It’s a group mind, and it believes the logical conclusion of its presence is either it must kill all life in the universe, or be killed.
I think that’s enough of a sense of the plot. I haven’t really shown well all the elements of the story that weave together to form this plot. Suffice to say that there are more pieces to this set of blocks than your normal set of Duplos. But most of the characters are engaging. Between that and the story it doesn’t really drag despite its length. Definitely worth the read, though it’s not something to fit in bits and pieces cause you’ll lose track of the moving parts that way for sure.
One other thing though: this is the first book in a series of a length I do not know. There is only minor resolution at the end of the book, and it leaves a literal cliffhanger to entice readers into picking up the next book, Judas Unchained. I do hope there are only two books in the series though.
Title: Pandora’s star
Author: Peter F. Hamilton
Cover artist: John Harris
Imprint / publisher: Del Rey / Random House
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 988 p.
Publication date: February 2005
ISBN-10: 0-345-47921-1
Subject: Interplanetary voyages — Fiction
Subject: Mars (Planet) — Fiction
LC classification: PR6058.A5536 P36 2004
