25th July, 2007
Pandora’s Star
Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton.
I’m not sure what to think of Hamilton’s writing. I read Fallen Dragon (a fun summer read, chock-full of suspense and derring-do) and was reasonably pleased. Then I picked up the Night’s Dawn series and felt like smashing my face with a brick. Seriously, do not waste your time with Night’s Dawn. I made it to book 5 of 6 and felt like jumping off the nearest cliff just to make it end. I think the part where Al Capone’s “ghost” became a main character (no, really) is the point that I went for the hot-needles-in-my-eye treatment…
Getting back to the point of this post; Pandora’s Star, is it any good? In a word, kinda. The book starts out with some good ol’ sci-fi. You know, a star-flung civilization, interesting technologies, intra-species discord, aliens, mysteries, that kind of stuff. This goes on for, say, about a third of the way in and then my friends, it gets assy. Hamilton falls back into his create-insipid-one-sided-characters mode and attempts to write believable conversations about personal and social issues. In this, he fails. Hard. Thankfully, there isn’t as much of this tripe as there was in Night’s Dawn, but it’s still there. I found myself skimming through those chapters in order to get back to the main plot (which, after all is said and done, is decent enough to hold my attention).
This is part one of a two book series. Will I read the next one? I dunno. Probably at some point, but I’m not in much of a rush to do so. This book would have been far better had they edited out about 20% of it.
3/5 gogs.
Posted at 5:18 am | Comment (1)
On January 22, 2008 at 14:23 GogBlog said:
January 22, 2008 at 14:23
[...] Space Opera”, “Solid Space Opera… This series reminds me of the space operas by Peter Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds with a slightly more manageable cast of characters…” Well, shit, [...]