Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton
2.0 Stars
5-12-2018

An unfortunate and bloated book. I ended up Benjamin Buttoning this novel. The first part of the novel was boring and dumb (e.g. the sci-fi author failed to fully engage with how his technology would change life, e.g. we still have cars and car dealerships and money in 2400 AD, also he was throwing shade at socialism/any attempt at a non-barbaric society), so I skipped to the end of this 1000 page novel to see how things turned out. And the ending was kind of interesting? So then I reverse-skimmed the thing. And after reverse skimming I can say that the basic problem with the novel is that 2/3's of it is terrible. It involves not fully thinking about how science would change life, dumb characters, and dumb plotlines that go absolutely nowhere. One small example of this would be a visit to a far away colony where some of the inhabitants are waging a guerrilla war against an ethically ambiguous Federation Science outpost there. And the story goes deep into the Scottish-themed clans waging this war, and their techno-equivalents of old medieval weapons, and their buxom Scottish lassies, and it all has this choking air of RenFair about it. And that's like, a 50 page excerpt? And there's plenty more dumb excursions like this, e.g. an interminable police procedural, and an interminable overland hiking trip. I skipped these whenever they came up (they came up a lot) as they did not appear to actually impact or add to the main plot and were certainly not enjoyable to read.

In fairness, there is 1/3 of the novel which is decent-to-good. This 1/3 is the part of the novel that involves space, aliens, and first contact logic. I liked many of the alien races the author created, and how they have their own alien motivations and tech paths and history and way of thinking. In particular I appreciated how so many of the aliens are these just singular things or societies that are not trying to expand or paint the map in their color. Many of them are significantly older than humanity, and so there are questions about their true history and past interactions with each other and their relations to the super-structures that litter the book. Anyway, I've read the reviews for the sequel to this book, and apparently the author takes his bloviation to an even higher level in the sequel. It is a shame; there is a decent 500 page novel struggling to work its way out of this 2000 page series.