I tried to reserve judgment since I knew this was only the first half of the story, but that couldn’t change the fact that much of the page-turning felt more like work than pleasure. This variegated society is facilitated by wormhole technology, which allows people, goods and communication to traverse lightyears in mere moments. With targeted light pulses, the Deep Trance Meditation Machine puts your brain in the precise wave pattern that you want to experience. The narrative is equal parts detective fiction, cosmic spirit quest, political conspiracy theory thriller, and alien encounter mystery, with plenty of tropes from other genres sprinkled liberally throughout. Let yourself be inspired by our magical, dreamy world based on the mystery of the night sky and the brilliance of starlight.

The story begins with the small human resistance that exists on what remains of the Commonwealth worlds attacked by the Primes. Their forces fail, but Johansson's Guardians of Selfhood have been preparing for this event, marshalling the weather of the entire planet and unleashing a massive directed hurricane that destroys the Starflyer's ship. Like Hamilton's earlier The Night's Dawn Trilogy, the Commonwealth Saga is an epic space opera that extends across dozens of worlds and characters. Despite the original plan to use it on the Dyson Alpha star and thus kill the entire prime race, a modified field version of a normal quantumbuster is eventually deployed on the Dyson Alpha forcefield generator, destroying the mechanism that was interfering with the generator's systems. These beneficial effects are brought about by the characteristic flickering light of the lamp-like structure.The holiday season is the perfect time to celebrate who we love and what we love with a meaningful gift. Pandora’s Star takes place in the late 24th century, where human civilization has evolved into the Commonwealth, a stable and prosperous civilization spanning hundreds of planets beyond Earth’s solar system.

PandoraStar is a flickering light device designed to simulate the brain’s natural production of neurochemicals for inducing altered states of consciousness as can be experienced with psychedelics such as DMT, sacred mushrooms, and Ayahuasca. My sails finally caught some much-needed wind in the last two chapters, but the few hundred pages leading up to that were punctuated by too many dull moments. After capturing two crew members of the Second Chance (one of them Bose), MorningLightMountain discovers the location of the Commonwealth.Owners of the PandoraStar Meditation Machine benefit from the large selection of sessions that the device is already programmed with.