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A review by damog
Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton
2.0
Pandora's Star has been my first Peter F. Hamilton book and it's taken two attempts to finish it. Safe then to say that I am probably walking slightly to the beat of my own drum when I say that I can't, at this stage at least, see myself as a Hamilton fan.
I give Pandora's Star two stars because I do think the idea of the Commonwealth, and mans colonization of the unisphere, is great. I did like some of the non-human aliens that Hamilton created, particularly Morning LightMountain. But it's there that my positives, so far as this book is concerned, dry up.
The negatives, on the other hand, are many. I love getting lost in a long book. Both Fantasy and Sci Fi are genres that particularly lend themselves to to lengthy tomes as they build out fantastic worlds for you, the reader, to inhabit. Pandora's Star, on the other hand, completely outstays its welcome very early on in it's near 1000 pages. Hamilton doesn't give us exposition and world building, he simply describes the mundane in painful detail repeatedly. Tens of pages at a time are dedicated to describing isolated incidents that don't build out the world he is creating, the story he is telling or the characters that inhabit either. As a point in case, quite early in the book we have dozens of pages dedicated to a character going on a trip in a glider. We are told about the way the glider works, the weather conditions, the landscape over which the glider flies, how the character feels about the glider and what the character was doing the day before the glider flight. Absolutely not one sentence of this contributes to the book in any way other than to add bloat to it. This, unfortunately, sets the tone for the book generally. And to cap it off, after nearly 1000 pages, Hamilton then leaves you literally on a cliffhanger.
Slightly related to the length of the book, the pacing is the most bizarre I have ever encountered. We get the scene setting in a way that I would expect, and then we get some scene setting somewhere else, and then a bit more unrelated scene setting and then we get a bit of a surge on the main narrative which promptly stops for a couple of hundred pages of what really is nothing more than description and then we think we are back onto narrative but it is a, quite frankly, embarrassing crime sub-plot that doesn't really go anywhere. At this point let's stop and describe, not some really cool new technologies (I think I actually rolled my eyes every time I came across the term 'e-butler'), but just some really boring stuff. Then, about 100 pages before the end, we can get going with the main narrative and, just as it gets interesting, stop writing the book. It's the most bizarre pacing of a book I have come across in a long time.
Then there are the characters. A plethora of characters are thrown at you and every single one of them is nothing more than a cardboard cutout, many of which seem to be cut from exactly the same template. I struggled to keep track of who I was reading about for a couple of reasons. Firstly, none of the characters are really developed, they are simply described to us in the most redundant of ways and typically with nothing much more to say about them than what they look like and what they are wearing (more on that in a minute). Secondly, further to the point on pacing, you sometimes go for hundreds of pages without talking about a character, only to cut right back to that character mid-chapter. The problems with focus shift in this book are constantly breaking the forth wall.
Something else that I thought was worth calling out specifically, the sex. I got to the point where I just about couldn't see anything but the wholesale sexism in this book. I would be interested to know if any woman has managed to actually bother to get through this book given the level of degradation dealt out to their gender. Women, it would seem, have evolved to be not one thing more than sex objects in the future. They only way they get anything from people, or achieve anything to benefit others is to hand out sexual favours. This even goes for significant political leaders should they be unfortunate enough to be missing a penis. And the way the sex is described in this book has a good number of porn movies looking like heartfelt studies of the human condition. I don't exaggerate when I say that every single female character in this book is reduced to a sex object. Hamilton comes across as writing the fantasies of a particularly sad adolescent boy many times in this book.
All in all, I struggle to see how this book gets the high praise it seems to. Will I be going back for more? I almost feel like Hamilton has sucker punched me into reading the equally long follow up just to see if anything happens and maybe I will, but not any time soon.
I give Pandora's Star two stars because I do think the idea of the Commonwealth, and mans colonization of the unisphere, is great. I did like some of the non-human aliens that Hamilton created, particularly Morning LightMountain. But it's there that my positives, so far as this book is concerned, dry up.
The negatives, on the other hand, are many. I love getting lost in a long book. Both Fantasy and Sci Fi are genres that particularly lend themselves to to lengthy tomes as they build out fantastic worlds for you, the reader, to inhabit. Pandora's Star, on the other hand, completely outstays its welcome very early on in it's near 1000 pages. Hamilton doesn't give us exposition and world building, he simply describes the mundane in painful detail repeatedly. Tens of pages at a time are dedicated to describing isolated incidents that don't build out the world he is creating, the story he is telling or the characters that inhabit either. As a point in case, quite early in the book we have dozens of pages dedicated to a character going on a trip in a glider. We are told about the way the glider works, the weather conditions, the landscape over which the glider flies, how the character feels about the glider and what the character was doing the day before the glider flight. Absolutely not one sentence of this contributes to the book in any way other than to add bloat to it. This, unfortunately, sets the tone for the book generally. And to cap it off, after nearly 1000 pages, Hamilton then leaves you literally on a cliffhanger.
Slightly related to the length of the book, the pacing is the most bizarre I have ever encountered. We get the scene setting in a way that I would expect, and then we get some scene setting somewhere else, and then a bit more unrelated scene setting and then we get a bit of a surge on the main narrative which promptly stops for a couple of hundred pages of what really is nothing more than description and then we think we are back onto narrative but it is a, quite frankly, embarrassing crime sub-plot that doesn't really go anywhere. At this point let's stop and describe, not some really cool new technologies (I think I actually rolled my eyes every time I came across the term 'e-butler'), but just some really boring stuff. Then, about 100 pages before the end, we can get going with the main narrative and, just as it gets interesting, stop writing the book. It's the most bizarre pacing of a book I have come across in a long time.
Then there are the characters. A plethora of characters are thrown at you and every single one of them is nothing more than a cardboard cutout, many of which seem to be cut from exactly the same template. I struggled to keep track of who I was reading about for a couple of reasons. Firstly, none of the characters are really developed, they are simply described to us in the most redundant of ways and typically with nothing much more to say about them than what they look like and what they are wearing (more on that in a minute). Secondly, further to the point on pacing, you sometimes go for hundreds of pages without talking about a character, only to cut right back to that character mid-chapter. The problems with focus shift in this book are constantly breaking the forth wall.
Something else that I thought was worth calling out specifically, the sex. I got to the point where I just about couldn't see anything but the wholesale sexism in this book. I would be interested to know if any woman has managed to actually bother to get through this book given the level of degradation dealt out to their gender. Women, it would seem, have evolved to be not one thing more than sex objects in the future. They only way they get anything from people, or achieve anything to benefit others is to hand out sexual favours. This even goes for significant political leaders should they be unfortunate enough to be missing a penis. And the way the sex is described in this book has a good number of porn movies looking like heartfelt studies of the human condition. I don't exaggerate when I say that every single female character in this book is reduced to a sex object. Hamilton comes across as writing the fantasies of a particularly sad adolescent boy many times in this book.
All in all, I struggle to see how this book gets the high praise it seems to. Will I be going back for more? I almost feel like Hamilton has sucker punched me into reading the equally long follow up just to see if anything happens and maybe I will, but not any time soon.