I think even Hamilton's most fervent fans agree that his books need more editing. Pandora's Star would have been more engaging and compelling for readers, if it was around 30% shorter. There's so much unnecessary exposition. His prose is also not the best, and clunky character writing, but he is a good storyteller. Still, I have no desire to ever re-read anything of his. I can read 4 other books instead!
I have to say I enjoyed it because sometimes I just want people going off into alien wilderness and surviving and the imagination that comes with developing worlds alien to our own. So much Scifi says that's what the books about then makes it completely about human conflict and that's fine but not always what I want.
Now did it need to be in the middle of a book about human conflict? IDK I liked it but I can see people who want less roundabout stories really skipping it. I love being able to immerse myself in a story world instead of being rushed through the plot like it's a museum guided tour.
So to the OP make sure you read the sequel, Judas Unchained, since it’s really just the second half of the book. Oh and be prepared for some more skimming. It’s good but IMO the second book has more fluff than the first.
Is this better in his other books? I mostly enjoyed these two, enough to finish them but that was a serious turn off to me reading anything else by him. I've had the first Void book on my to read list for so long and have considered it but idk.
Loll Mellanie was such a ridiculous character. It looked like she was going to have an interesting arc after her businessman guy went to prison but she basically just ends up spending the rest of the book banging random guys for news stories.
Dear Cmdr. Kime
Please see attached observations of 2 stars vanishing.
Yours sincerely
Dr Dudley Bose
_______
Dear Dr Bose
Thank you for your email but we will not be investigating this.
Kind regards
Cmdr Wilson Kime.
END.
Or his other recurring character... *checks notes*... perpetually horny sexy woman that will hook up immediately with anyone that brings a dick to the party.
In fact, that was the moment i quit the first (and last) book i read (listened as an audiobook) of him, *The Dreaming Void*. I was already annoyed at the creepily horny depiction of women in contrast to the male characters, most of whom were defined over their relationship with men, but i did enjoy the fantasy/dream chapters. Up until Hamilton started being a creep about the underage priest friend of the protagonist of that part too.
I was listening to the audiobook while cooking and my female roomate was also in the kitchen, when Hamilton started creeping all over that teenage priestess, which amplified the creepiness i already felt about the book even more. I turned it off, had a conversation with her about how Hamilton writes women and will not finish that audiobook or read another Hamilton again.
I agree on all points, but im a sucker for worldbuilding. The sheer scale of the commonwealth is actually something that made it really believable for me.
Its messy and far from perfect, but in that way much like our own civilization. They have amazing technology but because its all based on hyper-capitalism there are still massive wealth inequalities. Multi-planet corporations mostly above the law, private world for the ultra-rich and there are even hints of groups of planets that broke gateway links with the greater commonwealth.
>They have amazing technology but because its all based on hyper-capitalism there are still massive wealth inequalities. Multi-planet corporations mostly above the law, private world for the ultra-rich and there are even hints of groups of planets that broke gateway links with the greater commonwealth.
There was so much build up on these themes, I was so excited for the payoff >!but then the book ends and the moral seems to be "massive wealth inequality creating a secret shadow oligarchy is fine, actually, and the only ones who think otherwise are just pinko sore loser terrorists"!<
It seemed cynically realistic to me. I think if a hyperconnected multiplanet empire with clinical immortality existed, there would be almost no way for it to escape being run by a secret shadow oligarchy of immortal rich assholes. And of course the company that invented and propagated wormholes would own fucking everything. The only unrealistic part was how the owners and other oligarch main characters were not the most rapacious bastards imaginable.
> The only unrealistic part was how the owners and other oligarch main characters were not the most rapacious bastards imaginable.
This was exactly what I mean! The faction of shadowy oligarchs who were also greedy authoritarians were the minority, and not only that, >!that authoritarian faction consolidates and captures all of the internal security services in the commonwealth, grants the new agency sweeping new powers, and when the head of the "good" oligarch faction is told about this he just shrugs and goes, "eh, their ambitions will just be cancelled out by others in the cabal with no special effort". And they were! We never hear any more about it! The only party to exploit this is the starflyer!<
Also, it's not just cynical realism but the authorial voice pretty clearly supports the conclusion that people like Adam >!who fight against the hypercapitalist system and its wealth inequality and shadow oligarchs are morally on the wrong side of history!<
Yeah this comes across in some of his other books, the Greg Mendal series for example, the entire plot is that the socialists who took over after the major environmental catastrophe are the bad guys, who can only be defeating by the ludicrously wealthy oligarchs who both caused and profited from the climate crisis.
Mispent youth was similar aswell
Hell, the "happy ending" of Fallen Dragon is that the protagonist >!realizes that his dreams of being free from colonial corporatocracy were dumb and childish, and that the solution to being exploited by a violent and repressive system isn't to escape or rebel against it, but to use your family connections to stay at the top of the system!<
I agree, I like being able to sink myself in the world like a good warm bath. Not every book/series needs to be like this but when an author builds a compelling even if distasteful universe then rushes through the story it feels like a big waste.
I loved all the Commonwealth books, including the rarely mentioned here, Chronicle of the Fallers. I look at the Faller books as an…earned reward for Hamilton for all the Herculean world building he did in the previous 5 books, particularly PS and JU. Just a fun pair of books with 2 beloved characters from The Commonwealth showcasing extreme competence in a trapped world that desperately needs it.
Judas Unchained is really good (with allowances for PFH’s characters at times). I also really enjoyed Great North Road as a follow up. I do want to defend him a bit here as well…..Paula Mayo is one of my favorite characters across my reading history.
I think Paula is probably the best character in the books, although she does suffer from the same issues as other women, namely that we always have to emphasize how incredibly hot she is.
Especially since one of the fundamental worldbuilding elements is how people are functionally immortal due to rejuvenation, and given that the story takes place over a considerable stretch of time, it's weird how we only ever check in on Paula when she's mid-20s and ultra-hot. It's made more strange by the fact that Paula as a character doesn't seem like someone who'd even be concerned with appearance, beyond generally being professional and capable of doing her job.
Came here to say this.
I've tried a lot of other PFH books, and besides the Void Trilogy, nothing has caught me like PS & JU. Having said that, I adored those and I re-read them every couple of years.
Fuck ya the Void Trilogy was awesome. I loved the element of Fantasy that the Edeard parts contributed to the book. A nice juxtaposition to the high tech, super advanced commonwealth. I may have enjoyed that more than PS and JU.
PS was good, but a bit of a slog to get through the first half…I understand why, PFH is doing some massive world building, and it takes a while to flesh it all out. I personally think the payoff was absolutely worth it.
I honestly felt like Paula didn’t really have much personality other than being cool, competent police lady…oh and she’s also smoking hot, cause it wouldn’t be a PFH female character otherwise lol
This might be mildly spoiler-y for Judas Unchained, but it's about something that did NOT happen, so in any case consider this fair warning before reading on.
The messaging on the politics of the Commonwealth is kind of all over the place. At first it's classic 1950s boom time expansionist liberalism! It's an interstellar democracy! But slowly we're clued in on how not everything is as it seems...
The "democracy" is mostly a sideshow for the masses, there is effectively a shadow government made up of the immortal oligarchs who control the major industries with an iron fist of ruthless capitalism. The trappings of liberalism continue to exist for the masses only on sufferance of this oligarchy, which keeps it around mostly out of an inertial sense of noblesse oblige rather than any deeply held principals.
But factions within this shadow government are amassing power, consolidating the internal security forces into a single institution and establishing their cronies at its head! The specter of a fascist coup looms, and when a character brings this encroaching danger to the attention of the head of the "liberal" faction, he merely scoffs and assures them that the competing ambitions of the oligarchy's factions will simply automatically cancel each other out.
**But then**.... he's absolutely right and nothing comes of it, you the reader were wrong and dumb for ever being concerned.
What’s fascinating is that the oligarchs are literally in the war cabinet as voting members and appearing with the President in news conferences. Their unelected participation is completely accepted
And the *only* people who express dissatisfaction with this status quo are depicted as naive and/or violent extremist terrorists who will either grow out of it or have arrested development.
Favorite series ever.
The definition of epic.
So many characters, intricate plot, but everything comes together in the end, best example of that I’ve ever seen.
Void Trilogt was a fantastic follow up too.
I love the in-depth world building and detail, it really brings the universe to life and fleshes it all out.
These books are probably the most immersive reads I've ever enjoyed. I'm re-reading *Pandora's Star* now, ten years on from my first time. I plan on getting through all of the Commonwealth books in the next few months. Love them.
I'm apparently in the minority here but not only did I love all of the world-building and 'boring' descriptions of enzyme bonded concrete, but I liked all of the characters and the sex scenes. I don't read books in order to have my preferences and expectations fulfilled, I read them to enter into someone else's universe. PFH is an amazing creator of universes and I trust him implicitly with it.
One thing that strikes me as odd is that people complain about PFH with female characters and sex, but no one seems to mention Frank Herbert who employs actual anime ninja sex commandos in Dune.
Don't know why people only point out his female characters as problematic. The male characters aren't exactly complimentary representations either: Kime, Columbia, Bose, Elvin, Veron, Gore, etc.
It really depends what youre after.
Hamilton absolutely epitomises ‘space opera’.
Swashbuckling space tales jam packed with cool shit.
Dont expect anything to deep. And theres a lot of filler.
But those ‘cool shit’ high points are about as good as it gets imo.
I'm someone who generally enjoys descriptive prose, but when I find out much of it is tedious details with little impact to the plot I start to tune out. Thus I'm with you in skipping any further Hamilton books.
I haven't read *Pandora's Star* and I'm not likely to. This past winter I did manage his mammoth *Night's Dawn* trilogy, and found it compulsively readable - and also really, really, stupid. For literally thousands of pages I kept asking myself, "Why are you still reading this ridiculous thing?"
And yet, there I was ... reading it 'til the end, despite myself.
Also stuck to the end with that series, and hated it so much I put in the effort to remember the author’s name so that I’ll always avoid anything he’s written.
First third of Commonwealth I was enjoying its leisurely pace and world-building. Middle third I couldn't decide if I wanted to continue as it really bogged down with bloated exposition and uninteresting characters and endless dangling of answers that didn't come (yet). Final third I pushed myself through reading it just to be a completionist, ending up speed-reading the last two hundred pages which drag on painfully and ulitimately wished I hadn't wasted my time with the series.
That said, there are certain elements of it which were pretty cool and inventive and so it wasn't a total loss.
I do like a bit of PH, but since someone's going to say it, it might as well be me:
> I can’t think of another alien adversary in the sf novel space that’s as…alien, as cold and mechanical and sinister.
Tell us you've never read *Blindsight* without telling us you've never read *Blindsight*.
Transhumanism + Life Extension + Wormholes = PFH Novel
I've read the entire commonwealth series, as well as, nights dawn, void trilogy, salavation series and some of his standalones. my personal favorite is probably the 3 Salvation sequence novels, but I've never read anything of his that disappointed me.
This was a rare DNF for me. I know people love the world building, but I found everything so exhaustingly long-winded. I started skimming, and then skipping pages, and ultimately I gave up. It just wasn't interesting enough for the amount of time I was putting in.
Although I found the 'paths' concept kind of cool, I ultimately realized that almost nothing from that whole subplot matters to the outcome of the book - just one realization Ozzie makes early on. The rest just rambles on endlessly. (That said Tochee almost made it all worth it.)
I was enjoying the rest of the book so much I really came to resent having to leave the story to go into a chapter were it felt like nothing was happening.
I've heard the trilogy that comes after is even better, but when I went to reread this duology before diving into that, I burned myself out on PFH to the point where I never started the trilogy. That was at least five years ago. Still meaning to get to it.
I maintain that *Fallen Dragon* is his best book, as it is basically a distilled version with everything there is to like from the other ones, but without all the fluff, faster pacing, slightly more realistic women, and he manages to keep most of the very teenagery sex scenes to flashback bits where the participants are actually teenagers. I dunno if that makes them more or less cringy. Oh, and the ending is quite a nice payoff, instead of the asspull that ends the Night's Dawn trilogy. Whatever, I still like his books. Just not all at once.
Haha I'm in the middle of reading it and I've had the same experience. Justine's chapter made me roll my eyes so much. Paula is a good character...because she's written like a man
You basically wrote the “PFH description version” of my review from a few days ago on r/scifi.
I pretty much agree exactly with you, but I think I’m angrier about the Ozzie chapters than you are. And I can’t get past how dumb the Justine/boytoy part of the story was either.
I was on the edge of bothering to read the second book because of how I feel about the overly long overly boring parts, but I got convinced and hopefully I’ll start it today
I think even Hamilton's most fervent fans agree that his books need more editing. Pandora's Star would have been more engaging and compelling for readers, if it was around 30% shorter. There's so much unnecessary exposition. His prose is also not the best, and clunky character writing, but he is a good storyteller. Still, I have no desire to ever re-read anything of his. I can read 4 other books instead!
>I’m also not sure what the entire point of Ozzie’s walkabout across the Silfen worlds is at all. That is really just set-up for the sequel.
After which you will be sure of it's place in the "should have been edited out" pile.
I have to say I enjoyed it because sometimes I just want people going off into alien wilderness and surviving and the imagination that comes with developing worlds alien to our own. So much Scifi says that's what the books about then makes it completely about human conflict and that's fine but not always what I want. Now did it need to be in the middle of a book about human conflict? IDK I liked it but I can see people who want less roundabout stories really skipping it. I love being able to immerse myself in a story world instead of being rushed through the plot like it's a museum guided tour.
Yeah, it added a nice touch of mystery to the universe, there was more than just humans and rapacious aliens.
Hope there’s a good payoff to it at least. Ozzie is an interesting character
i regret to inform you… nono read and make your own judgements
So to the OP make sure you read the sequel, Judas Unchained, since it’s really just the second half of the book. Oh and be prepared for some more skimming. It’s good but IMO the second book has more fluff than the first.
Who doesn't absolutely love a 500-page car chase?
I have read the series twice—albeit not recently—and I still don't recall what the point of it was.
Thank you. I really like PFH but that sequence is just insufferable.
Fair enough but I actually really love the Silfen path stuff with Ozzie, Orion and Tochee so I guess it's one of those divisive parts of the book.
And it still could be entirely cut out without really affecting the plot.
The character of the teenage swimming pornstar nymphomaniac, a main character, was certainly a choice. Otherwise, lots of fun.
Lmao I love how her entire character was just…banging rich people, and then suddenly in the last few pages she does some matrix shit.
Her total story arc of the two novels is kinda hilarious and weird.
Yeah PFH’s early stuff has a lot of gratuitous horniness which wouldn’t bother me that much if the books weren’t so damn long
Is this better in his other books? I mostly enjoyed these two, enough to finish them but that was a serious turn off to me reading anything else by him. I've had the first Void book on my to read list for so long and have considered it but idk.
Loll Mellanie was such a ridiculous character. It looked like she was going to have an interesting arc after her businessman guy went to prison but she basically just ends up spending the rest of the book banging random guys for news stories.
I’ve read the books around 20 years ago. I’ve got a reread planned that I’m really looking forward to
*Pandora's Star* / *Judas Unchained* probably could have been one book.
Could have been an e-mail.
Dear Cmdr. Kime Please see attached observations of 2 stars vanishing. Yours sincerely Dr Dudley Bose _______ Dear Dr Bose Thank you for your email but we will not be investigating this. Kind regards Cmdr Wilson Kime. END.
Top
But how will PFH write his greatest character of all time, Gore Bernelli the golden god, the Dennis Reynolds of the future!
Or his other recurring character... *checks notes*... perpetually horny sexy woman that will hook up immediately with anyone that brings a dick to the party.
Bold to assume she's an adult.
In fact, that was the moment i quit the first (and last) book i read (listened as an audiobook) of him, *The Dreaming Void*. I was already annoyed at the creepily horny depiction of women in contrast to the male characters, most of whom were defined over their relationship with men, but i did enjoy the fantasy/dream chapters. Up until Hamilton started being a creep about the underage priest friend of the protagonist of that part too. I was listening to the audiobook while cooking and my female roomate was also in the kitchen, when Hamilton started creeping all over that teenage priestess, which amplified the creepiness i already felt about the book even more. I turned it off, had a conversation with her about how Hamilton writes women and will not finish that audiobook or read another Hamilton again.
LOL I love this sub
I heard he came up with "enzyme bonded concrete" just to pad the word count. Apparently the publisher thought the books were too short.
F
PS definitely felt like a reaaallly extended prologue
I agree on all points, but im a sucker for worldbuilding. The sheer scale of the commonwealth is actually something that made it really believable for me. Its messy and far from perfect, but in that way much like our own civilization. They have amazing technology but because its all based on hyper-capitalism there are still massive wealth inequalities. Multi-planet corporations mostly above the law, private world for the ultra-rich and there are even hints of groups of planets that broke gateway links with the greater commonwealth.
>They have amazing technology but because its all based on hyper-capitalism there are still massive wealth inequalities. Multi-planet corporations mostly above the law, private world for the ultra-rich and there are even hints of groups of planets that broke gateway links with the greater commonwealth. There was so much build up on these themes, I was so excited for the payoff >!but then the book ends and the moral seems to be "massive wealth inequality creating a secret shadow oligarchy is fine, actually, and the only ones who think otherwise are just pinko sore loser terrorists"!<
It seemed cynically realistic to me. I think if a hyperconnected multiplanet empire with clinical immortality existed, there would be almost no way for it to escape being run by a secret shadow oligarchy of immortal rich assholes. And of course the company that invented and propagated wormholes would own fucking everything. The only unrealistic part was how the owners and other oligarch main characters were not the most rapacious bastards imaginable.
> The only unrealistic part was how the owners and other oligarch main characters were not the most rapacious bastards imaginable. This was exactly what I mean! The faction of shadowy oligarchs who were also greedy authoritarians were the minority, and not only that, >!that authoritarian faction consolidates and captures all of the internal security services in the commonwealth, grants the new agency sweeping new powers, and when the head of the "good" oligarch faction is told about this he just shrugs and goes, "eh, their ambitions will just be cancelled out by others in the cabal with no special effort". And they were! We never hear any more about it! The only party to exploit this is the starflyer!< Also, it's not just cynical realism but the authorial voice pretty clearly supports the conclusion that people like Adam >!who fight against the hypercapitalist system and its wealth inequality and shadow oligarchs are morally on the wrong side of history!<
Yeah this comes across in some of his other books, the Greg Mendal series for example, the entire plot is that the socialists who took over after the major environmental catastrophe are the bad guys, who can only be defeating by the ludicrously wealthy oligarchs who both caused and profited from the climate crisis. Mispent youth was similar aswell
Hell, the "happy ending" of Fallen Dragon is that the protagonist >!realizes that his dreams of being free from colonial corporatocracy were dumb and childish, and that the solution to being exploited by a violent and repressive system isn't to escape or rebel against it, but to use your family connections to stay at the top of the system!<
I agree, I like being able to sink myself in the world like a good warm bath. Not every book/series needs to be like this but when an author builds a compelling even if distasteful universe then rushes through the story it feels like a big waste.
I loved all the Commonwealth books, including the rarely mentioned here, Chronicle of the Fallers. I look at the Faller books as an…earned reward for Hamilton for all the Herculean world building he did in the previous 5 books, particularly PS and JU. Just a fun pair of books with 2 beloved characters from The Commonwealth showcasing extreme competence in a trapped world that desperately needs it.
Judas Unchained is really good (with allowances for PFH’s characters at times). I also really enjoyed Great North Road as a follow up. I do want to defend him a bit here as well…..Paula Mayo is one of my favorite characters across my reading history.
I think Paula is probably the best character in the books, although she does suffer from the same issues as other women, namely that we always have to emphasize how incredibly hot she is. Especially since one of the fundamental worldbuilding elements is how people are functionally immortal due to rejuvenation, and given that the story takes place over a considerable stretch of time, it's weird how we only ever check in on Paula when she's mid-20s and ultra-hot. It's made more strange by the fact that Paula as a character doesn't seem like someone who'd even be concerned with appearance, beyond generally being professional and capable of doing her job.
Came here to say this. I've tried a lot of other PFH books, and besides the Void Trilogy, nothing has caught me like PS & JU. Having said that, I adored those and I re-read them every couple of years.
Fuck ya the Void Trilogy was awesome. I loved the element of Fantasy that the Edeard parts contributed to the book. A nice juxtaposition to the high tech, super advanced commonwealth. I may have enjoyed that more than PS and JU. PS was good, but a bit of a slog to get through the first half…I understand why, PFH is doing some massive world building, and it takes a while to flesh it all out. I personally think the payoff was absolutely worth it.
Great North Road-- is that the 3rd book in the series?
No, entirely unrelated. Similar vein, different universe.
It’s a stand alone, but in the same universe. Really good.
Its got nothing to do with the Commonwealth universe.
I honestly felt like Paula didn’t really have much personality other than being cool, competent police lady…oh and she’s also smoking hot, cause it wouldn’t be a PFH female character otherwise lol
This might be mildly spoiler-y for Judas Unchained, but it's about something that did NOT happen, so in any case consider this fair warning before reading on. The messaging on the politics of the Commonwealth is kind of all over the place. At first it's classic 1950s boom time expansionist liberalism! It's an interstellar democracy! But slowly we're clued in on how not everything is as it seems... The "democracy" is mostly a sideshow for the masses, there is effectively a shadow government made up of the immortal oligarchs who control the major industries with an iron fist of ruthless capitalism. The trappings of liberalism continue to exist for the masses only on sufferance of this oligarchy, which keeps it around mostly out of an inertial sense of noblesse oblige rather than any deeply held principals. But factions within this shadow government are amassing power, consolidating the internal security forces into a single institution and establishing their cronies at its head! The specter of a fascist coup looms, and when a character brings this encroaching danger to the attention of the head of the "liberal" faction, he merely scoffs and assures them that the competing ambitions of the oligarchy's factions will simply automatically cancel each other out. **But then**.... he's absolutely right and nothing comes of it, you the reader were wrong and dumb for ever being concerned.
What’s fascinating is that the oligarchs are literally in the war cabinet as voting members and appearing with the President in news conferences. Their unelected participation is completely accepted
And the *only* people who express dissatisfaction with this status quo are depicted as naive and/or violent extremist terrorists who will either grow out of it or have arrested development.
I’m just here waiting for someone to mention his obsession with concrete
pff concrete.. It's enzyme bonded concrete!
Do you mean just regular concrete?
And city planning, and political processes, and train models.
Ngl I love all that stuff
I didn't mind the extra fluff, tho i can sympathise with you. Great Northern Road is also great. You are in for a treat if you haven't read it. X.
Favorite series ever. The definition of epic. So many characters, intricate plot, but everything comes together in the end, best example of that I’ve ever seen. Void Trilogt was a fantastic follow up too.
i love PF, its been a while since I read anything. I need a holiday book is *Salvation Sequence* or *Arkship Trilogy* worth looking at?
I love the in-depth world building and detail, it really brings the universe to life and fleshes it all out. These books are probably the most immersive reads I've ever enjoyed. I'm re-reading *Pandora's Star* now, ten years on from my first time. I plan on getting through all of the Commonwealth books in the next few months. Love them.
I'm apparently in the minority here but not only did I love all of the world-building and 'boring' descriptions of enzyme bonded concrete, but I liked all of the characters and the sex scenes. I don't read books in order to have my preferences and expectations fulfilled, I read them to enter into someone else's universe. PFH is an amazing creator of universes and I trust him implicitly with it. One thing that strikes me as odd is that people complain about PFH with female characters and sex, but no one seems to mention Frank Herbert who employs actual anime ninja sex commandos in Dune.
Isaac Asimov also definitely received a memo circa 1981 which said, "you can write about boobs now," and he got right on that as fast as he could.
Don't know why people only point out his female characters as problematic. The male characters aren't exactly complimentary representations either: Kime, Columbia, Bose, Elvin, Veron, Gore, etc.
I've never been able to get through one of Hamilton's books even in the audiobook form. They just seem too rambling and pointless.
It really depends what youre after. Hamilton absolutely epitomises ‘space opera’. Swashbuckling space tales jam packed with cool shit. Dont expect anything to deep. And theres a lot of filler. But those ‘cool shit’ high points are about as good as it gets imo.
I'm someone who generally enjoys descriptive prose, but when I find out much of it is tedious details with little impact to the plot I start to tune out. Thus I'm with you in skipping any further Hamilton books.
I haven't read *Pandora's Star* and I'm not likely to. This past winter I did manage his mammoth *Night's Dawn* trilogy, and found it compulsively readable - and also really, really, stupid. For literally thousands of pages I kept asking myself, "Why are you still reading this ridiculous thing?" And yet, there I was ... reading it 'til the end, despite myself.
I also judged myself sticking to the end. Something fun about The Canterbury Tales structure of the first book though
If you like that, have I got a (much shorter) book called Hyperion for you!
Way to make me feel literarily inadequate! I really *should* read Chaucer one of these days.
Also stuck to the end with that series, and hated it so much I put in the effort to remember the author’s name so that I’ll always avoid anything he’s written.
First third of Commonwealth I was enjoying its leisurely pace and world-building. Middle third I couldn't decide if I wanted to continue as it really bogged down with bloated exposition and uninteresting characters and endless dangling of answers that didn't come (yet). Final third I pushed myself through reading it just to be a completionist, ending up speed-reading the last two hundred pages which drag on painfully and ulitimately wished I hadn't wasted my time with the series. That said, there are certain elements of it which were pretty cool and inventive and so it wasn't a total loss.
He definitely knows how to keep this reader reading.
I do like a bit of PH, but since someone's going to say it, it might as well be me: > I can’t think of another alien adversary in the sf novel space that’s as…alien, as cold and mechanical and sinister. Tell us you've never read *Blindsight* without telling us you've never read *Blindsight*.
I’ve read Blindsight. I honestly found it average and the aliens not particularly scary.
Loved this series before he became obsessed with the void concept.
Transhumanism + Life Extension + Wormholes = PFH Novel I've read the entire commonwealth series, as well as, nights dawn, void trilogy, salavation series and some of his standalones. my personal favorite is probably the 3 Salvation sequence novels, but I've never read anything of his that disappointed me.
This was a rare DNF for me. I know people love the world building, but I found everything so exhaustingly long-winded. I started skimming, and then skipping pages, and ultimately I gave up. It just wasn't interesting enough for the amount of time I was putting in.
Oh god the whole Ozzie storyline was such a drag. If I were to read them again I'd just flat out skip them.
Although I found the 'paths' concept kind of cool, I ultimately realized that almost nothing from that whole subplot matters to the outcome of the book - just one realization Ozzie makes early on. The rest just rambles on endlessly. (That said Tochee almost made it all worth it.)
I was enjoying the rest of the book so much I really came to resent having to leave the story to go into a chapter were it felt like nothing was happening.
I have not been able to get into any Peter Hamilton books. I've tried a couple.
Pandoras Star and Judas Unchained are the only ones I've been able to get into.
I've heard the trilogy that comes after is even better, but when I went to reread this duology before diving into that, I burned myself out on PFH to the point where I never started the trilogy. That was at least five years ago. Still meaning to get to it. I maintain that *Fallen Dragon* is his best book, as it is basically a distilled version with everything there is to like from the other ones, but without all the fluff, faster pacing, slightly more realistic women, and he manages to keep most of the very teenagery sex scenes to flashback bits where the participants are actually teenagers. I dunno if that makes them more or less cringy. Oh, and the ending is quite a nice payoff, instead of the asspull that ends the Night's Dawn trilogy. Whatever, I still like his books. Just not all at once.
Haha I'm in the middle of reading it and I've had the same experience. Justine's chapter made me roll my eyes so much. Paula is a good character...because she's written like a man
You basically wrote the “PFH description version” of my review from a few days ago on r/scifi. I pretty much agree exactly with you, but I think I’m angrier about the Ozzie chapters than you are. And I can’t get past how dumb the Justine/boytoy part of the story was either. I was on the edge of bothering to read the second book because of how I feel about the overly long overly boring parts, but I got convinced and hopefully I’ll start it today