Pandora's Star
- 1,169
- Pages
- about 21 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“Pandora’s Star” is space opera on the grandest scale, driven by one superb question: who sealed a distant star inside a barrier, and why? The mystery and the sweep of its wormhole-linked civilisation are what readers stay for. Some find the characters hard to warm to, and at well over a thousand pages it is only the first half of a two-volume story, so it needs commitment.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Pandora's Star is the first part of Peter F. Hamilton's epic Commonwealth Saga duology – a fantastic galaxy-spanning novel from the master of space opera. For fans of Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds. At the edge of the galaxy something awakens – and it's coming for us . . . Earth AD 2329: Humanity has colonized over four hundred planets, all interlinked by wormholes. For the first time in mankind's history there is peace. Then a star over a thousand light years away suddenly vanishes, imprisoned inside a force field of immense size. Yet who – or what – has that sort of technology? And what could this mean for us? Only a faster-than-light starship, captained by ex-NASA astronaut Wilson Kime, can reach that distance to investigate. For Wilson, getting inside the force field could be easy. It may be harder to stop something else from getting out. What if there was a very good reason to seal off an entire star system? The Commonwealth Saga duology concludes with Judas Unchained.
Reading order · Commonwealth Saga
Full order & progress →- Pandora's StarThis book
8.28.2 / 10 - Judas Unchained
8.38.3 / 10
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.3 across 501 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 77% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Fantasy average of 8.0. That is how 8.2 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardcover | 8.3 | 501 | 100% |
Frequently asked
How long is Pandora's Star?
It has 1,169 pages — longer than 98% of the ranked books in Fantasy.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Fantasy — and a score of 8.2, the closest to this book.
