Pandora's Star

I'm (finally) nearing the end of the first book in this series... and have one or two questions or maybe just one main question about wormhole technology...

the Second Chance was supposedly the first interstellar spaceship built, built to travel to the Dyson Pair. If so, how did the Commonwealth, a group of several hundred planets spread over hundreds of light years, come into existence in the first place?

They went on trains through the wormholes.

Pandora's Star for the reference.

I found it ok, at best. The 2nd book continues in exactly the same vein as the first, as if the entire story had been written as a 2000 page epic, and he just took a clever to it halfway through.

There are lots of other little issues with the technology, continuity and imagination. Probably would have made a good 900 page trilogy if you cut all the excesses away.

Arthur C. Clarke: Arthur C. Clarke: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'

I really enjoyed the Commonwealth books. Yeah he writes massive tomes. However, I wouldn't call them bloated, especially when compared to the authors Void trilogy.

The basic strategy was to slog a wormholes terminus to its destination by slower than light ships (prior to FTL ships). I thought running railroad tracts through the wormhole was novel and perhaps unrealistic due to the unstable nature of a wormhole, but then again, Arthur C. Clarke was dead on target when he said 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' ;-)

To pile on a bit, yes, wormholes obviated the need for FTL ships for planets within a certain distance. The Dyson Pair was too far away to reach with a wormhole.

I liked both Pandora's and Judas a lot, although I liked Judas better (the last 200 pages or so are really good.) He wrote both of them as one story, but his publisher made him chop it in half.

The basic strategy was to slog a wormholes terminus to its destination by slower than light ships (prior to FTL ships).

They didn't need any equipment at the other end of the wormhole -- that's how the wormhole guys got to Mars before the first manned mission, at the beginning of the book -- so they didn't need ships, slow or fast. They planet-hopped to get out further than the distance they could open a wormhole (must have been just a power problem, because they thought the Dyson aliens could build a wormhole back to the Commonwealth)

> 5 Can you imagine trying to read that all as one book? My knees would have buckled every time I tried to pick it up!

>7 Aerrin99: I have Pandora's and Judas in paperback, so the "shock value" wasn't as high. (I also have Night's Dawn on my nook.) However, I have all three Void books in hardback, and my bookshelf is really mad at me!

hmm 2000 pages could easily have been turned into 4-5 separate books. I can see breaks where The Second Chance is attacked and successfully escapes, and also at the chilling scene where Dudley Bose's memories warn the scout ships...

9> It could be turned into 4-5 separate books BY WEIGHT, but not necessarily by value. There's just so much in (well, admittedly I've only read the Night's Dawn trilogy) Hamilton's books that doesn't move the overall plot along. ND was bad enough when they split each "volume" of the trilogy into two parts. The ND trilogy clocks in at about 3600 pages overall, but I never felt like they had much more overall story than most 1000 page novels I've read. I can't imagine paying for nine new hardcover books to get ND. I bought most of them used and I still felt like I'd overpaid.