Pandora's Star cover art

Pandora's Star

Commonwealth Saga, Book 1

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Pandora's Star

By: Peter F. Hamilton
Narrated by: John Lee
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About this listen

Pandora's Star is the first part of Peter F. Hamilton's epic Commonwealth Saga duology – a fantastic galaxy-spanning novel from the master of space opera. For fans of Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds.

At the edge of the galaxy something awakens – and it's coming for us . . .

Earth AD 2329: Humanity has colonized over four hundred planets, all interlinked by wormholes. For the first time in mankind's history there is peace. Then a star over a thousand light years away suddenly vanishes, imprisoned inside a force field of immense size. Yet who – or what – has that sort of technology? And what could this mean for us? Only a faster-than-light starship, captained by ex-NASA astronaut Wilson Kime, can reach that distance to investigate.

For Wilson, getting inside the force field could be easy. It may be harder to stop something else from getting out.

What if there was a very good reason to seal off an entire star system?

The Commonwealth Saga duology concludes with Judas Unchained.

'The best book Hamilton has written in years' - Guardian

'Anyone who begins this won’t be able to put it down' - Publishers Weekly

©2004 Peter F Hamilton (P)2008 Tantor Media Inc Adventure Science Fiction Space Opera Interstellar
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It's hard to review this book. On the one hand, it introduces a vast number of characters without a clear indication of who is essential to the story. Its pacing is uneven, with long stretches of historical information and description (often overly detailed), and the few action sequences are interrupted with segways. And it isn't really a single 1,000-page book; it's the first half of a 2,000-page book — it abruptly stops without even an attempting to impersonate a stand-alone book.

But, on the other hand, it showcases Mr Hamilton's stunning imagination. The author has conceived of many worlds and aliens, including the fascinating main enemy. Equally as interesting is how the author envisions human society will evolve with access to instantaneous travel, the ability to live hundreds of years with rejuvenated bodies, and the extreme concentration of wealth.

If you are not in a hurry, this is a great first half of a story.

Epic in scale

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An outstanding novel! I absolutely love the world building, characters, and entire premise. Very well done story. The performance was good but not great, with several conversations between characters difficult to tell who was talking due to similar voices. Overall it was an excellent listen and I have bought the sequel, and I'll listen to this again in a year or two. Highly recommend!

Absolutely love the world building

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I can't fault the voice actor who seems to be performing with precision to a bad brief.

He voices the characters as if directly out of a comedic theatrical murder mystery, with disturbing consistency. There is not a single naturally delivered line. It's easy to blame a fit to the dialogue, which is similarly one-dimensional and cliched. No one really speaks like this. And no one sounds like this either. The actor rolls his R's and elongates his vowels, implying a posh British accent, yet uses the very un-posh American pronunciation of "past" and "ask". It's extremely jarring. An accent from the 22 century perhaps? Certainly not one from this age.

Overall the author's poor dialogue and the actor's absurd performance was such a distraction that I gave up after a few hours. I liked the first ingredients to the story, and the universe seems interesting, but I could already see a few plot holes forming and growing.

I'm not good at quitting books. But this was easy.

Cringeworthy performance over shoddy dialogue

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