Take a photo of a barcode or cover
scruffymorris 's review for:
Pandora's Star
by Peter F. Hamilton
In 2380 the human race has developed wormhole technology which has allowed us to colonize hundreds of planets. The Commonwealth is a society with very few problems; ageing has been cured through rejuvenation, it's a mostly peaceful society with no wars and people are free to live however they choose. When an astronomer observes a distant star trapped inside a massive force field the Commonwealth has to develop it's first ever starship to investigate the potential threat.
Epic is a word that gets thrown around a lot when describing Science Fiction and Fantasy but Pandora's Star is really worthy of it. The short description above doesn't really do justice to the hugeness of the story being told here but I didn't want to go overboard and give too much away. A lot of the fun of the book is in following the various plot lines, watching as they move apart and overlap slowly expanding the scope of the story as we go.
Pandora's Star is most commonly described as a space opera but it's so much more than that. It seem's that almost every genre is covered here at some point from detective story to political thriller, fantasy and more. Peter F. Hamilton is able to cover so much ground because the world he has created is so well thought out and richly detailed that there are a huge number of stories to be told in it. We see the world from all sides; the super rich politicians, astronauts, police, reporters, terrorists, average citizens and even aliens. In one of my favourite sections of the book we switch to the point of view of an alien species as it is encountering humanity for the first time. The alien species is truly alien, not just another humanoid life form. It thinks and acts in a very different way to us and Hamilton did a really good job of leading us through it's thought processes and making us understand something that is so strange.
The book is packed with detail. I'm not always a fan of books that spend a lot of time building a world in such extreme detail but for some reason it really works here. It's a huge book but I never felt like it was a slog to get through, in fact it's quite a page turner. With so many different view points I would usually expect there to be one or two plot lines that don't work as well as the others but that wasn't the case here. I was fully absorbed in the story the whole time and my only real complaint was that sometimes it was hard to remember where some plot lines had left off after they had been gone for 100 pages or more. You are required to hold quite a lot in your head as your reading the book but it really is worth the effort because the further you get into the story the more rewarding it becomes.
A lot of Pandora's Star is pure set up and things really get moving towards the end. This is really just the first part of one huge novel which concludes with Judas Unchained. Considering the multiple cliff-hangers that we are left on here that's a book I am really looking forward to getting stuck in to.
For more of my reviews please visit: http://www.scruffyfiction.co.uk
Epic is a word that gets thrown around a lot when describing Science Fiction and Fantasy but Pandora's Star is really worthy of it. The short description above doesn't really do justice to the hugeness of the story being told here but I didn't want to go overboard and give too much away. A lot of the fun of the book is in following the various plot lines, watching as they move apart and overlap slowly expanding the scope of the story as we go.
Pandora's Star is most commonly described as a space opera but it's so much more than that. It seem's that almost every genre is covered here at some point from detective story to political thriller, fantasy and more. Peter F. Hamilton is able to cover so much ground because the world he has created is so well thought out and richly detailed that there are a huge number of stories to be told in it. We see the world from all sides; the super rich politicians, astronauts, police, reporters, terrorists, average citizens and even aliens. In one of my favourite sections of the book we switch to the point of view of an alien species as it is encountering humanity for the first time. The alien species is truly alien, not just another humanoid life form. It thinks and acts in a very different way to us and Hamilton did a really good job of leading us through it's thought processes and making us understand something that is so strange.
The book is packed with detail. I'm not always a fan of books that spend a lot of time building a world in such extreme detail but for some reason it really works here. It's a huge book but I never felt like it was a slog to get through, in fact it's quite a page turner. With so many different view points I would usually expect there to be one or two plot lines that don't work as well as the others but that wasn't the case here. I was fully absorbed in the story the whole time and my only real complaint was that sometimes it was hard to remember where some plot lines had left off after they had been gone for 100 pages or more. You are required to hold quite a lot in your head as your reading the book but it really is worth the effort because the further you get into the story the more rewarding it becomes.
A lot of Pandora's Star is pure set up and things really get moving towards the end. This is really just the first part of one huge novel which concludes with Judas Unchained. Considering the multiple cliff-hangers that we are left on here that's a book I am really looking forward to getting stuck in to.
For more of my reviews please visit: http://www.scruffyfiction.co.uk