Book reviewlet.

[swestrup]

I just finished reading Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton. Its a pretty good bit of space opera, and is loads of fun if you can manage to keep from asking about where the nanotech is. I love the main conceit of the book, which is that the future Intersolar Commonwealth is made up of 600 or so planets linked by ground-based wormholes and threaded by a rail system. Thus, one can take a local commuter train from Calcutta, through a wormhole to LA, and through another wormhole to a planet light years away. This is sufficiently convenient that many people commute from one planet where they live, to another where they work.

There were only two things that bothered me about the book:

1. The author consistently writes "This is different TO that", which just sounds wrong to me. I was taught that the correct phrase is "This is different FROM that". Considering he uses the term 'different to' a dozen times in the novel, I was getting rather irked by it at the end.
2. He has an alien race with a nifty biological feature that I was sure I had invented and which I plan to spring on whoever plays in my next SF role-playing game. I hate it when someone has the same unique idea as me, and then publishes first. Now it'll look like I'm stealing...

Another complaint is that I thought the story was a complete novel when I bought it, not book 1 of 2. The only indication of this is on the title page inside. The cover makes no mention of a follow-up book. But, for that, I blame the publisher, not the author.

Comments

[ims.livejournal.com]

"Different to" bothers me as well, but it's quite common in British English: I think not as common as "different than", but enough that it doesn't seem to be treated as nonstandard.

I feared as much.

[swestrup]

Since the number of incidences of its use has been on the rise for some time, I feared it was probably becomming standard usage somewhere.

Re: I feared as much.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

One of my greatest linguistic fears is that the word 'your' will become irrevocably corrupted.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

Frank Herbert's Whipping Star posited a similar system of interworld teleportation. It did have a good example of a truly alien mind, but much of the rest of the story suffered from Herbert's tendancy to wierdness.

[swestrup]

Yes, but Whipping Star didn't build a transit system around them. Folks just walked through. Otherwise I agree. His Dosadi Experiment sequaloid was much better.