https://www.goodreads.com/series/list/25375.Peter_F_Hamilton.html
In which I present the Wikipedia page for Pandora’s Star in audio, and the stock art fever dream version that “AI” selected for each sentence:
Pandora’s Star is what happened to humanity when some Cali bros upstaged NASA’s Mars landing by being there first, via wormhole technology.
Wormhole tech is clean as Star Trek in this universe, but has some limits. Most aren’t explored at first, because after the humiliation of Wilson Kime and the other astronauts on the Mars mission, wormhole generators are ubiquitous as we leap forward into the real story.
The story sprawls. I made a decision to gush about the book, but I cannot pretend that this book is easy to share a vision with. There is so much going on here that the Wikipedia article successfully summarizes the whole Commonwealth Saga without even mentioning Paula Myo, which is deeply funny to me because it cuts to the bone of what this book, and its sequel really are, as writing and not just plot.
In fact, take note that there is no Wikipedia page for Pandora’s Star at all. Its sequel shares the page for a pretty good reason. The end of Pandora’s Star is a cosmic joke that has zero funny until you’ve looked for possibly hidden pages and done the grief stages and started the longer book, Judas Unchained.
This is one story, precision cut at an especially ironic instant in the story. As such, this double story is covered in the audio presentation without warning. I think of this as the inverse treatment, paying forward something the book won’t.
Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained are indisputably the story of the human race making their first contact with unknown aliens locked inside a rather geometrically trippy Dyson Sphere projection. The “Dyson aliens” are well beyond the range of the Commonwealth’s farthest reaches, an idyllic planet called in fact Far Away, but it’s not so far that there would be meaningful buffer time if bad news broke one day. This mission is for fact-finding. Humanity is quite soft, despite being menaces to one another. On the galactic stage, they’ve done little but worship themselves with rejuvenation and business, and both are often for pleasure.
To accomplish this plot goal, humanity will design a new engine from base concepts, its first long range science ship, and must use it to reach the enclosure site. They will know nothing until that moment, and even then, they might learn nothing anyway. All of this must be conceived of, built, staffed, then flown around for studying the barriers. Knowing all of this, there is an inaugural party for the selected staff and captain Kime (whose second chance at frontier discovery is the namesake of the starship, a heel’s chance to have the winner’s arc), wherein terrorism is performed.
The wiki text blissfully skims directly to arrival at a Dyson star, but you will not have that experience if you read the original text.
Pandora’s Star is an experience you might hate the first time around, but after feeling the closure of Judas Unchained, you might smile dumb one day and feel like riding again.
The book has procedural DNA, but the characters are exotic. Paula Myo is basically an escaped Bee Movie character who put her parents away as a kid for trying to rescue her from Bee Movie world. (I jest here, but the text is more verbose, if not philosophically eloquent about the situation.)
The cast is so diverse that it would seem performative to even list them, by name or not. This is used by Hamilton to move dozens of pieces around a board that seems to have no limits. Paula Myo is the glue of the story’s tone that doesn’t even remotely pay off until Judas Unchained is well underway, but if you’re enjoying it anyway, it’s because Paula becomes entertaining to watch. Ozzie becomes interesting to watch, an impossibility on the first six nights in the elven frost woods with a kid who is probably not an orphan but seems like it.
Pandora’s Star is a space opera that may only meaningfully take you to a given world once, but its arsenal of abstracted detail upon introduction becomes relaxing when you understand the rhythm of the story in front of you.
You’ll learn about the well-connected grand families entrenching themselves in the burgeoning concept of war politics in a Commonwealth that has no space military. The conception of the Navy doesn’t even come up for a while. In effect, the Commonwealth has busied itself with planetary expansion and industrial expansion, forming ideal living zones with industry on barren worlds. They have made themselves pretty, but dangerous pretty faces is one of Hamilton’s types, and his Commonwealth has a few claws.
Hamilton has much to say on many kinds of characters. The last one I can’t possibly leave out is Melanie. While she has a semi-magnanimous end in another set of work in the Void saga, the Melanie we have here is a young, sexually powerful woman who plays a peculiar ascendant side role. Her porn shoot with the DOL won’t convince you. Sexual power is not exclusive to this character, but this saga enjoys its dips into debauchery. Sex is a currency for several, and the money changers are busy sometimes. There is some apparent taboo around sex change rejuvenation, and at least one meeting constructed to rely on lesbian allure alone…
But honestly, if you are this deep in these books, maybe it’s possible you deserve it. There were way easier ways.
Pandora’s Star was a book that almost broke me on first go. I went in cold and he threw Siberian winter at me and asked if I’m gonna be able to handle three times more. Maybe I identified with Ozzie in the end. Of book two.
Reasons this book stands out to me after years:
The introduction of MorningLightMountain made me realize the author could do much more than spin tales of an overripe civilization. I don’t think this was the most interesting alien around, but when it arrives in the narrative, the brain that was taking in breezy details about planets will suddenly be devoted to taking in the history of the Primes, and Hamilton’s breath control is commendable as he tells you evermore. MorningLightMountain seizes the Commonwealth’s collective attention in a way that I enjoy seeing in an faster-than-light society.
In Judas Unchained, I got to see a Commonwealth that used wormholes as weapons of war. I would complain only to request so much more. Seeing a sequel effectively dedicated to a space opera warfront was fun, and there’s room for more with detailed and motivated writing. In these books, fun comes first, and here it unlocks some scenes that simply may not happen again as main-line humanity moves on to fight with sharper tools.
As vast as Pandora’s Star is (Paula Myo alone seems to take us to most worlds), reading the Void trilogy and beyond will make you feel like this book represented an adolescent humanity who thought they were tougher than they really were and got hard checked. Humanity will go on to basically forget the Primes as an embarrassing accident that could have been avoided had they known more aliens, but experiencing their desperation on the ground, scene by scene, is a war story you remember with them.
The ice adventures got interesting. I’m not sure how to talk about this, because it drags in context that doesn’t appear in this post or Wikipedia. Ozzie’s wonderland adventure is not a relaxing B-story, but it’s about the journey, and the journey is pretty tense for a long time there. His adventure with Orion is inseparable from the Pandora’s Star experience, though it’s the second book that entices on this front. Ozzie walks away from science while the rest of the series runs at it for military applications, and his wormhole tech might be the inciting incident and violent end to another civilization. This is a man who is not in control of his destiny, and his journey strongly reflects that.
In this universe, Hamilton has the freedom to allow characters to reappear in other books every now and then. The longevity of the rich and influential is part of this story, a continuum that includes even Wilson Kime, our only real everyman (Dudley, get yourself under control; like, I know MorningL—), who is alive with the likes of the Burnellis.
Hamilton loves his universe, and you’ll detect that. The sound and pressure wave of a wormhole opening nearby, the city built in the rim of a crater, the complex political climate of a world, the actual climate of a world, the compulsive procedural detective who wants to tap wormhole freight traffic everywhere on the path to Far Away, and the bizarre weather system there.
When Hamilton takes you gliding in the low atmosphere of Far Away and tells you what it looks like, you simply pay attention.
The Wikipedia text lyrics follow:
Pandora's Star
The book opens with a short section providing backstory. As part of the first mission to Mars, a team of astronauts exits their spacecraft for the first time, only to see another man standing there, connected to an air hose that leads through a wormhole to a laboratory in California. The wormhole generator's inventors, Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaac, chose to test it by beating the crew, by moments, to become the first humans to reach Mars. The saga then moves into the Commonwealth era in 2380, when humanity has used the wormhole technology to colonise several hundred planets across hundreds of light years.
On a distant planet, astronomer Dudley Bose performs the first detailed observations of a mysterious astronomical event known as the Dyson Pair Enclosure. Two stars, located roughly 1,000 light years from Earth (750 light years from the edge of Commonwealth space), disappeared some time in the past. The theory is that they have been enclosed inside Dyson spheres.
Bose's investigations reveal that the enclosing of Dyson Alpha and Dyson Beta (as the stars become known) occurred quickly and simultaneously. This implies that the technology of the Dyson aliens, or possibly of other unknown aliens, surpasses that of the Commonwealth; furthermore, did the Dyson Aliens enclose themselves, or did some other force enclose them? Was it for protection or to protect those outside the spheres?
To investigate, the Commonwealth builds its first interstellar ship, the Second Chance. Lacking contemporary astronauts, it gives the command to Wilson Kime, one of the members of the original Mars mission. Using a self-enclosed "flowing" wormhole for propulsion, the Second Chance travels to Dyson Alpha.
When the Second Chance arrives and begins to explore what appears to be an enclosure generator, an unknown mechanism shuts it down and the barrier around the star disappears. Formerly imprisoned inside is an extremely warlike and aggressive species, a race that comes to be called "the Primes". They consist of intelligent "immotiles" that breed and control vast armies of sub-sentient "motiles" via electronically extended neural interfaces. The few immotiles constantly vie with each other for territories and resources, and by the time of the story, the strongest uses the technology gleaned by analysis of the human's wormhole-generation techniques to destroy all the other Prime immotiles and thus become the only one remaining Prime: MorningLightMountain.
Primes had previously colonised the solar system referred to as Dyson Beta using slower-than-light starships and had committed genocide against its native inhabitants in the process. Disconnected from their originating immotile groupings, and provided with novel biological forms, Beta's Primes started to routinely alter themselves through genetic manipulation and mechanical augmentation. This was an anathema to the Alpha Primes, who referred to them as AlienPrimes. With Beta's Primes no longer under the control of Alpha's Primes, a war began between the two systems. The war appears to have continued until forces unknown erected the barrier around the stars.
After capturing two crew members of the Second Chance (one of them Bose), MorningLightMountain discovers the location of the Commonwealth. Upon learning of the Commonwealth's existence, MorningLightMountain makes it its primary objective to destroy it. Having been in almost continual combat for its entire evolution, MorningLightMountain believes that it is necessary to eliminate all other life in the Universe to secure its survival into the distant future; it views all life that is not under its control as a potential threat.
Hamilton weaves several other stories into the main narrative of the Prime encounter. Among these is that of the ancient spacecraft Marie (sic) 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.
Judas Unchained
Judas Unchained, the second part of the Commonwealth Saga, picks up where Pandora's Star ends.
The story begins with the small human resistance that exists on what remains of the Commonwealth worlds attacked by the Primes. Human resistance forces have found two ways to fight back: using the Prime weapons (primarily directed-energy weapons) against the invaders, and disrupting communication between the slave caste (motiles) and the commanding caste (immotiles) of the Primes. Meanwhile, the humans in the remaining Commonwealth pursue other plans: to develop a set of weapons and warships to defend against the next Prime invasion and force the conflict back into Prime space; to develop a "quantumbuster superweapon" based on technology supplied, unbeknownst to most humans, by the Starflyer; and to prepare for the evacuation of known space altogether if necessary.
Eventually, the human forces decide that there can be no other solution to the conflict than to commit genocide and destroy the Primes entirely. However, it is revealed that the Primes are planning a much larger invasion, which humanity will be all but powerless to stop.
As the war rages, the human forces begin to build much faster, better armed ships and fitting them with new "quantumbuster" weapons that can destroy an entire planet. Later on, a more advanced quantumbuster is deployed, which is capable of inducing a main-sequence star to go nova. Despite the original plan to use it on the Dyson Alpha star and thus kill the entire prime race, a modified field version of a normal quantumbuster is eventually deployed on the Dyson Alpha forcefield generator, destroying the mechanism that was interfering with the generator's systems. This allows the mechanism to reactivate, trapping the Prime aliens inside and avoiding genocide.
Meanwhile, the Commonwealth forces slowly realize that Johansson is correct, and that the Starflyer is an AlienPrime that escaped the enclosure event. After crashing on Far Away, it has been plotting how to destroy both the Alpha Primes as well as dangerous humanity by manipulating events to force both races to commit mutual genocide. Beta Primes would then become the dominant lifeforms. Through a long trail of companies, it funded Bose's "discovery" of the enclosure and snuck agents aboard Second Chance with a device to deactivate the enclosure generator.
As the Starflyer attempts to return to Beta, human forces engage in a desperate chase to prevent it from escaping. Their forces fail, but Johansson's Guardians of Selfhood have been preparing for this event, marshalling the weather of the entire planet and unleashing a massive directed hurricane that destroys the Starflyer's ship. Johansson is aboard the Marie Celeste, and the action ends with him preparing to kill the Starflyer.
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