Pandora's Star

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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. 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. I AM very impressed with the whole book, and even more so that Hamilton keeps pulling off these HUGE works, but I'm worried that I'm bouncing off of them. 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. Orphan's Plot Trinket: The Silfen Friendship pendant given to Orion by his parents. Helps him and Ozzie out on the Silfen paths a few times by pointing them in the right direction.

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. All Planets Are Earthlike: Averted. In one chapter, a planet is methodically reached, explored, and rejected for settlement potential in the course of several hours.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.

First, the good stuff: there's a hugely epic plot here, ultimately concerned with ensuring the continued survival of the human race; bold, three-dimensional characters who are intriguing, and draw you into their story; plot twists that you truly never see coming, and which are revealed with a subtle mastery that forces you to rethink everything you've read up until that point;and a fascinating, amazingly-thought out world that all of this is set in.The story is about the discovery of a couple of stars which dissapear, the investigation as to what happened and the subsequent consequences. Hard to write this review without spoliers so I shall skip the detail of the plot and just say it is quite complex and there is a lot of detail but never so much that you end up confused as to who is doing what and why - a triumph in books this large in both size and scope.