I have to tell you that Peter F. Hamilton, even without a personal website that I can find, is one of my favorite writers. I just finished Pandora’s Star and it ranks right up their with his Night’s Dawn trilogy. Nearly a thousand pages–this is part one of two–and the characters are there, the plot twists are there, the SFnal creativity is there. Sort of pisses me off that I didn’t wait until the second half comes out next year so I could read it all at once but I’ll probably just re-read this one then.
Nearly 400 years from now life is good for most humans. By 2050, wormholes, memory storage and periodic body replacement are developed and now people live on hundreds of planets for hundreds of years. Good is not perfect, of course, since people still have emotions that block optimum decisionmaking as we have today. A few alien races have been encountered, though not many, and those that have are either friendly or far less developed. Mainly people can experience variety and abundance on, well, exactly the scale we dream of today. Which is kind of Hamilton’s point.
Not everyone believes that all the aliens are benign. Specifically, one group claims that an alien named the Starflyer (which has never actually been seen by anyone who’ll admit it but is alleged to have been on a crashed ship on a world called Far Away) has subverted people at the highest levels of government and business, to ends that will do great harm to humanity.
Elsewhere, one of the few academic astronomers left–who needs telescopes when you can open a wormhole close up–notices two stars simply disappear from the sky. Hundreds of lightyears away, so he takes a wormhole train to another planet at the right distance so he can observe and record the event as it happens. The stars don’t explode, their light simply disappears in three seconds like a light switch turned them off.
A starship is built and a couple of hundred humans take a four month trip to see one of the systems in person. On arrival, the crew find the star system is inside some type of quantum barrier and then one day, two thousand years after it appeared the barrier switched off. Though not at the second system. Inside are, well, exactly the vicious, powerful kind of alien that’s been missing so far. Someone put the barrier up for a reason.
I don’t want to say more but I’ve barely scratched the depths of the creations Hamilton’s got in here. Those psychological imperfections mentioned are wielded like craftsmen’s tools and when the final page is read I could have punched the author for making me to wait until next year for the second half.
definitely recommended
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