The verdict
Genuinely enormous and genuinely good, with a comfortable future you will miss once it starts coming apart.
Quick facts
- Author
- Peter F. Hamilton
- First published
- 2004
- Publisher
- Macmillan
- Series
- Commonwealth Saga, book one of two
- Best for
- Wide-screen futures with real ideas underneath, and readers who do not mind a slow first act
- Skip it if
- You dislike multi-strand plots or very long books
Author Peter F. Hamilton
Pandora’s Star is Peter F. Hamilton’s 2004 novel about a human Commonwealth that has spread across hundreds of worlds through artificial wormholes, and about two stars a thousand light years away that somebody has sealed inside force fields. It is enormous, it is enormously readable, and it contains one of the best alien antagonists in modern science fiction.
The idea behind it
Hamilton’s Commonwealth is the most comfortable future in the genre and he is not embarrassed about it: people live for centuries, travel between planets through train stations, and have solved poverty. The novel opens by letting you enjoy that, at length, before it explains what has been hiding in the sky.
The two enclosed stars are the hook. Something built a sphere around each of them, and a species capable of that is either a neighbour or a threat. Almost everything in the book, including its politics and its violence, follows from the question of which.
The story, spoiler-light
There are dozens of viewpoint characters and the novel takes its time with all of them. A detective pursues a suspect across centuries. A mission is launched to reach the sealed stars. A young woman joins a corporate family. A planet nobody thinks about turns out to matter enormously.
Two things are worth knowing before you start. The first hundred pages are deliberately idyllic and slow, and the book turns hard when it turns. And this is half of one story: it ends mid-arc, with Judas Unchained completing it, so plan on reading both.
What makes it science fiction
The infrastructure is the science fiction. Wormhole technology collapses distance, which changes what a colony is, what a navy is for and how politics works, and Hamilton follows each of those consequences properly. The trains between worlds are one of the most convincing pieces of world building in the genre, precisely because they are mundane.
Set against that comfort is the Prime: a species that is genuinely alien in the way it thinks, because it is not one mind but a single organism that grows by absorbing what it meets. It is the best reason to read the book, and the reason the second half is so tense.
Who should read it, and who should give it a miss
Read it if you want a big, generous, wide-screen future with real ideas at the base of it, and if you do not mind a novel that takes a thousand pages to make its case. It is genuinely hard to put down once the second half starts.
Give it a miss if you dislike multi-strand plots, or if a slow first act frustrates you. There are a great many characters, several of them are unpleasant, and the book is unapologetic about its length.
Where to start, and what to read next
Start here. It is the first half of a single story, so this is not a choice: Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained are two volumes of one novel, and stopping at the end of this one leaves you mid-sentence.
The two to pick up next are Judas Unchained, which is the second half and finishes the story this one starts, and The Dreaming Void, which opens the Void trilogy set in the same universe a thousand years later and is the better jumping-off point if you want more rather than less.
The rest of the sequence, for reference: the Commonwealth Saga is Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained, and it is followed by the Void trilogy, The Dreaming Void, The Temporal Void and The Evolutionary Void, and then by the Chronicle of the Fallers. The wider setting is sometimes called the Commonwealth universe, and it is one of the largest continuous futures anyone has built.
The verdict
Genuinely enormous and genuinely good, with a comfortable future you will miss once it starts coming apart. Read it for the Prime.
Frequently asked questions
Is Pandora’s Star a standalone novel?
No. It is the first half of one story, completed by Judas Unchained. They were written as two volumes of a single work and end where they end.
Do I need to read anything before it?
No. It is the entry point to the Commonwealth universe, even though Hamilton wrote the Night’s Dawn trilogy earlier and separately.
Is it a hard read?
The prose is straightforward and the pages move quickly. The difficulty is the number of viewpoint characters and the length, not the style.
How long is it?
It runs to around twelve hundred pages in paperback, and Judas Unchained is a similar length. This is a two-book commitment rather than an evening.
Where can I buy it?
It is available in paperback and as a Kindle edition, and the buy links for Amazon.com and Amazon.in are on this page.