Peter Hamilton – Pandora’s Star

Commonwealth Saga, Book One, -Ish

Pandora’s Star has very solid speculative premise, namely, what if trains, but in space, and the promise of a hard SF mechanic underlying it had me quickly mashing the buy button. The space trains emerge as a side effect of wormhole technology. A wormhole is an expensive, high energy, hard to calibrate way of travelling point to point. So it’s pretty logical to hook up energy efficient movers of mass freight to those fixed points. Therefore, space trains.

Truth be told, despite solid friend recommendations, the first 200 pages were bloody hard work. Having finished volume one, I can now see that Pete set out to write War and Peace in the style of Arthur C Clarke. Tragically, he succeeds at this, and the result is scene setting where instead of a confusing but ultimately compelling tapestry of human emotional detail about the alien society of the 19th century Russian aristocracy, you get page after page of detailed descriptions of early 21st century neoliberal mallrats in space, where the sentences individually taste like cardboard, that goes on for twice the page count of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Every character sounds like Fred from Scooby Doo; even the women and aliens.

Somehow I managed to survive the nutrition desert of the extended opening and discover the fresh fruit of spaceship construction, megastructures and weird aliens on the other side. Even the annoying space elves got more interesting than the thundering pixie cliches suggested by their initial appearance. The last six hundred pages were great, and by the end of volume one the much trailed war has broken out and everything. There are another thousand pages to go.

You know, Sir Arthur was not ignorant of human emotion, but he never really faced it head on in his writing. He sensed it wasn’t his strength, and his most moving books, like The City and the Stars and Songs of Distant Earth, are better for it. It’s a very English tactic, I guess, a stereotypical one, but it works for a reason. What we cannot speak about, we must pass over like a rattling space train, as the aeronautical engineer once said.