Pandora's Star

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Samantha McFoster [JU] A clan member in the Guardians of Selfhood , technician for the planet's revenge At this point in the narrative, I would say that Ozzie is one of my favourite characters. Together with Wilson and Paula Myo. It’s been a while since I’ve read Sci fi this good. I’ve probably been making poor reading choices in this genre for a bit. But finally, I’ve hit pay dirt with an author who has hit the sweet spot with great concepts, epic landscape/world building, excellent plot, AND , very importantly, excellent CHARACTERISATION. The story is set some 300 years in the future where wormhole technology has allowed humanity to spread out to begin colonising other star systems. Maybe you wanted to look a little different for some special event? You don't want to trouble with a rejuvenation... that takes time. No problem. Get yourself set up with some OC Tattoos (Organic Circuitry). Change aspects of your appearance at will.

Because of the number of secondary characters in the novel, some characters become such clichés that they`re actually painful to read. Mark, the "everyday normal guy" witnessing the events of the novel in the midst of his very boring life, made me groan every time his name showed up. Mellanie, the nubian naive girl who gets mistreated by the rich man she loves blindly, was also very painful to read so stereotypical she was. It's a pity, because they ultimately bury great characters such as Nigel Sheldon or Ozzie, that show a bit more fleshing out. Oh, and to show you how poorly fleshed-out these secondary characters turned out to be, I was unable to find one woman in the novel that was not somehow beautiful and closer to a man's fantasy than an actual believeable woman. Unfortunately there is no closure at the end of this book the story continues and concluded in the next book Judas Unchained. Well, at least it's not a trilogy, though subsequent books are set in the same common wealth universe. Pandora's Star is a 2004 novel, written by Peter F. Hamilton. It is the first book in the Commonwealth Saga with its sequel, Judas Unchained.It is AD 2380 and humanity has colonized over six hundred planets, all interlinked by wormholes. With Earth at its centre, the Intersolar Commonwealth has grown into a quiet, wealthy society, where rejuvenation allows its citizens to live for centuries, by both rejuvenating their bodies, and transferring their memories into clones. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Not only with Dudley Bose, who unleashes a homicidal alien intelligence, but also with Bradley Johansson, who might have been able to warn people if he hadn't been busy blowing them up.

Renne Kempasa [CS] Investigator at the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate and later Lieutenant in Navy Intelligence It's a long book, but the pay off is worth it in my opinion. This was my first Hamilton book and I look forward to reading the others. Pandora's Star presents a multifaceted view of a future where wormhole technology has allowed mankind to colonize the universe, and genetics technology have made people practically immortal via rejuvenation treatments. Although the plot diverges in several directions, all of the story threads eventually become interwoven in a cliffhanger climax. AD 2380: Humanity has spread into a " Commonwealth" of wormhole-linked planets and has encountered a number of sentient alien races as well as the SI, or "Sentient Intelligence", an independent AI evolved from human technology. Nigel and Ozzie are two of the Commonwealth's most influential citizens due to their genius and their control of Compression Space Transport, the company at the heart of wormhole technology.Hamilton weaves several other stories into the main narrative of the Prime encounter. Among these is that of the ancient spacecraft Marie Celeste, found crashed on one of the Commonwealth planets, Far Away. An enigmatic figure, Bradley Johansson, claims the original passenger of the spacecraft is alive, an alien he calls the Starflyer. He claims that it is using mind-controlled agents to manipulate events in the Commonwealth, and that it caused the events that led to the discovery of the Primes. The Commonwealth forces dismiss Johansson as a crazy terrorist, and his attempts to interfere with the voyage to Dyson Alpha are thwarted. After listening to all of his books on Audible, I started all over again, this is the second time I've listened to The Commonwealth saga, and both books are excellent. This is most definitely a good listen But someone or something out there must have had a very good reason for sealing off an entire star system. And if the Second Chance does manage to find a way in, what might then be let out? Jerkass: There are a lot of characters which could be called this, but the cake goes to Nigel Sheldon, who revealed the wormhole technology he and his buddy Ozzie had been developing by basically going to Mars to make fun of the NASA astronauts who were just arriving ◊. We also have Paula, a detective on the hunt for a long-time offender who is repeatedly escaping her clutches and foiling her attempts to capture him. Her story had a few ups, but was mostly dead boring for me sadly.

The intertwined lives of the various characters and species, but most of all the complete escape from what we call normal, into a world (Sorry I should say galaxy) that just blows your mind. It's easier to spew about the cons than pros with this one, honestly. I just really enjoyed the story and the worldbuilding and really need to know how it ends!

I find John Lee to be a good narrator, his clarity is outstanding and his light inflections on tone and voice go a long way in developing a good connection between the story and the listening. I believe any book narrated b y him would be a damn fine listen. The narration is terrific, with lots of different accents and voices done by John Lee. He is a joy to listen to, and adds emotion and identity to his characters without overacting. I especially enjoyed his high society females, the way he read them was absolutely fantastic. Loved it all. The only other con is the sheer length. Hamilton describes a lot of stuff - planetary geography, city layouts, every single thinv a character does, etc. - in excruciating detail when it's really not necessary. I like more balance between description and actually moving the story along at less than a ponderous pace. On Velaines, Adam Elvin successfully evades a police trap set by Paula Myo and acquires weapons for the Guardians of Selfhood. This is up there with the best of the best for sci-fi space opera extravaganzas. It’s got world-building par excellance, brilliant projections of technology, and a great cast of characters. Set in 2380, Hamilton poses for us a Commonwealth of hundreds of planets colonized by different styles of humanity, made possible by wormhole technology. Immortalizing rejuvenation, artificial intelligence, and computer storage of human memories are standard fare woven into the saga in fresh ways. The few aliens encountered so far appear benign but mystifying. For example, the Silfen are friendly but boring to most humans in their simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle and hippie-like mystical outlook. But suddenly a dorky astronomer’s discovery of the disappearance of two stars 100 light years away raises the spectre of incredibly advanced aliens in the galaxy who can put up a spherical barrier around a whole solar system. Does the event imply a civilization wanting to protect itself from other dangerous aliens, or does it instead reflect a fencing in of a dangerous species by a more powerful but beneficient alien race?

That being said, if you do like to invest the time and effort, this scifi novel offers a pretty immersive story, the author taking his time to paint his universe. His characters are fleshed out very well, and none are 100% 'good' or 'bad', which gives them a realistic feel. Memory Gambit: Criminals will wipe memorycells after committing crimes to prevent them from being read. In a lot of ways, this ambitious novel, like all of the Peter F. Hamilton novels I can think of, should be put on a higher rung than all the other SF out there. Why? Because it's LONG. Citizens of the Commonwealth can rejuvenate when they grow old, essentially making them immortal. This has interesting implications for family and relationships: marriage is a much less permanent; first-lifers are considered less emotionally mature in comparison to people who have lived for a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred years. Living three lifetimes can build up a lot of memories of course, so memory manipulation and storage is big in Pandora's Star. None of the questions this technology raises are unique to this book; rather, they are standard SF fare: is the clone with an upload of your memories a continuation of you, or is it just a copy? How does being able to edit out the fact that you murdered someone affect your culpability? And so on. Hamilton is not breaking any new ground, but he does manage to integrate these ideas into an interesting, dynamic society. To that he adds a story with an exciting conflict, a challenging enemy, and great interstellar politics.Still; throughout all these gripes is an interesting bit of space opera waiting to unfold. The beauty of 'Night's Dawn' was to see a fully realized world fall to pieces under a new threat. 'Judas Unchained' promises to do exactly that to the world of 'Pandora's Star'. This promise has kept me going through this very long novel: that all I read so far was preparation for Peter Hamilton taking an awesome sledgehammer to his carefully constructed world. That is not to say I harbor fantasies of revenge upon this long novel, but rather that this long preparation might be worth it once Hamilton turns things upside down. Oscar Monroe[CS] Operations Director of the CST exploratory division on Merredin , a member of the Second Chance mission and later a Navy Captain of the starship Defender and after that the Dublin The grand size of the book surprised and pleased me at the same time. While some of the technical jargon was hard to follow at first the book was dedicated in part to helping me understand and I appreciated this. The überbeing Morning Light Mountain and the idea of a collective intelligence hive mind exponentially growing kind of insect like other kind of intelligence than humans thing, that is similar to a virus gone meta, is one of the most fascinating alien intelligence descriptions ever. Ever ever until it comes and exterminates your race. It´s not directly evil, it just hasn´t the intellectual need or interest to grasp that concept, it´s just his mentality logically developed because of an evolutionary arms race that made it necessary and possible to be a genocidal sociopath, what again lets it seem very similar to humans. But it´s not its fault, in contrast to humans.