Pandora's Star is a 2004 novel, written by Peter F. Hamilton. It is the first book in the Commonwealth Saga with its sequel, Judas Unchained.
Pandora's Star presents a multifaceted view of a future where wormhole technology has allowed mankind to colonize the universe, and genetics technology have made people practically immortal via rejuvenation treatments. Although the plot diverges in several directions, all of the story threads eventually become interwoven in a cliffhanger climax.
A quick summary of the numerous plot threads is as follows:
- Bumbling astronomer Dudley Bose observes an entire star system (one of two that have shared the same fate, Dyson Alpha and Beta) blink out of existence for no apparent reason, indicating a sort of instant-Dyson-sphere may have been erected.
- Humanity decides that either there is something bad inside the spheres that needed containing, or that there's something bad outside, and the Dyson aliens tried to protect themselves (it's the former). They construct their first ever interstellar ship (up to that point having used planet-bound wormholes and trains to travel between colonies) and send it to investigate Dyson Alpha. Dudley Bose is placed on-board as a political maneuver.
- A genetically engineered detective chases an interstellar terrorist, Bradley Johansson. Said terrorist is a conspiracy nut who constantly warns humanity of an unknown alien infiltrator.
- One of the co-inventors of the wormhole technology seeks the wisdom of intergalactic Space Elves regarding the Dyson pair, and gets stranded in the far corners of the galaxy, with an unknown alien and a young kid as his companions.
- The explorers sent to the Dyson stars discover a gigantic force field encompassing Dyson Alpha. Their arrival coincides with its shutting down for the first time in millennia (it's not a coincidence).
- Bad shit happens, setting up innumerable Cliffhangers for the next book, Judas Unchained.
It's a long damn book, and it's only the first half of the story.
Contains examples of:
- Absent-Minded Professor: Dudley Bose is a bumbling goof, and his lack of discipline unleashes a hideous genocidal monstrosity on the universe.
- Bold Explorer: In the prologue, Earth sends a manned spaceship to Mars whose crew is extremely irritated to discover that, while they were hoofing it, a couple of garage tinkerers in Los Angeles discovered how to create stable wormholes and beat them there. Fast forward five hundred years or so, and the normally wormhole-dependent Commonwealth builds an FTL-capable exploration starship named the Second Chance, captained by the pilot of the Mars expedition. (Immortality therapy was involved.)
- Brain In An Immotile: What happens to Dudley Bose.
- Can't Argue with Elves: The space hippie Silfen comprehend the universe in a way so different that they are barely able to communicate meaningfully with humans.
- Chekhov's Wormhole: Ozzie's personal asteroid and wormhole generator can get to almost anywhere in the Commonwealth, but is effectively useless for most of the book since Ozzie is outside Commonwealth space. Turns out to be important when Mellanie and the SI hack it to evacuate Randtown refugees.
- Conspicuously Public Assassination: The assassin kills Kazimir in a busy train station.
- Cool Starship: The Second Chance.
- Crystal Landscape: The forest around the Ice Citadel consists of crystalline trees. Ozzy finds this out the hard way when he tries to use one of the trees as firewood, only to discover that it isn't made of wood at all. The trees either evolved or were bio-engineered that way to survive the extreme cold.
- Dating Catwoman: Kazimir and Justine's relationship has shades of this.
- Death World: A frozen wasteland where greenhouses barely sustain life, obscenely vicious natural predators, and people who are forced to live off the scraps the space elves leave behind.
- The Prime homeworld has been like this ever since those Prime bastards invented nuclear weapons. Not that they cared much about it in the first place.
- Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: The SI tells MorningLightMountain to its face that "your logic is flawed".
- Dyson Sphere: It's actually an impenetrable forcefield.
- First Contact: It doesn't go so well.
- For Science!: The reason humanity wants to poke its nose in something it probably shouldn't.
- Four Lines, All Waiting: It is over 900 pages of seemingly unimportant plotlines and occasionally entire chapters of flavor text. Thankfully it's to set up the second, and much more action packed book in the series.
- Emphasis on "seemingly" there - on a subsequent read-through it becomes apparent how many guns Chekhov left laying around.
- Ghost Planet: One of the destinations the Silfen Paths take Ozzie, Orion and Tochee to.
- Godwin's Law: Invoked when preparations for a Commonwealth Navy are deliberately modelled after the Third Reich's initial workaround of the treaty of Versailles.
- Hive Mind: MorningLightMountain disrupts all other Immotiles and takes over their soldiers, basically becoming the whole Prime species.
- Insistent Terminology: It's a progressive wormhole generator, not a hyperdrive.
- Jerkass: There are a lot of characters which could be called this, but the cake goes to Nigel Sheldon, who revealed the wormhole technology he and his buddy Ozzie had been developing by basically going to Mars to make fun of the NASA astronauts who were just arriving
◊.- Though one short internal comment suggests Nigel at least partly regrets doing it like that.
- Language Barrier:
- MorningLightMountain is able to communicate with Dudley Bose only because it places his memories into another immotile; even such, its thoughts appear disjointed and alien.
- MorningLightMountain can only talk to the SI after the SI hacked into its communications network and by utilizing the knowledge gained while interacting with Bose.
- Memory Gambit: Criminals will wipe memorycells after committing crimes to prevent them from being read.
- Those of both victims and perpetrators.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Not only with Dudley Bose, who unleashes a homicidal alien intelligence, but also with Bradley Johansson, who might have been able to warn people if he hadn't been busy blowing them up.
- Orphan's Plot Trinket: The Silfen Friendship pendant given to Orion by his parents. Helps him and Ozzie out on the Silfen paths a few times by pointing them in the right direction.
- Ramming Always Works: A colossal invasion by an alien fleet that outnumbers the human fleet tens of thousands of times over is thwarted when one human ship hijacks an alien wormhole to their staging post and rams it. At twenty percent of the speed of light. Hilarity ensues. Missiles are later developed to exploit this idea.
- Though "thwarted" still leaves the humans in a tough spot - sure, the massive invasion was temporarily halted, but only after destroying 23 planets and with thousands upon thousands of the alien ships having already transited the wormhole. Ramming Always Helps A Bit.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The Primes.
- Took a Level in Badass: Remember Mellanie, that trophy girlfriend/space yuppie that was vapid and boring for the first 9/10ths of the book? Yeah. She becomes the avatar of the Sentient Intelligence and single-handedly annihilates an alien invasion fleet.
- The Watson: Hoshe Finn to Paula Myo and Orion to Ozzie. Orion's ignorance of Commonwealth society and tech gives Ozzie an excuse to pine for it while stuck on the Silfen paths and Hoshe gives Paula a chance to explain her super detective reasoning. At one point their relationship is lampshaded when they briefly mention having read Sherlock Holmes books.
- Wetware CPU: The Primes never discovered computer chip technology, meaning that MorningLightMountain controls all the different immotile units with mechanical processes. Additionally, it is distrustful of the computer processors it discovers with humans.
