That was a good one

This Week in Tech is an excellent, slightly rambling podcast hosted by Leo Laporte, where he gets in a few fellow geek luminaries and they discuss, er, the week's technology news. Episode 208 for the week just gone was an absolute scream, and meant Mali had to do a few extra ups and downs of the Avenues so that we listened to it all in one sitting.

As part of the 'cast, we learnt that Alive in Joburg was the YouTube film by Neill Blomkamp that convinced Peter Jackson to be the producer of District 9 (which I'm most definitely looking forward to). HBO are making a mini-series of grrm's Game of Thrones, and that there's going to be a reboot of V...

The 'cast also started waxing lyrical about Pandora's Star: "Peter F Hamilton is a god," quoth Leo, and I'll be waxing lyrically about the two books very shortly.

Anyway, if you're a tad geeky, and don't mind the rambling nature of the discussions - they range from the insanely dry techy to, as above, geekfests as above, or conversations about spaceship design in Star Trek - it's a 'cast well worth subscribing too.

Gatecrashing the Mars Landing, the Dyson Pair, Ozzie Isaacs and the Primes

Pandora's Star and its sequel, Judas Unchained are, by far, Peter F Hamilton's best work to date - an excellent, intricate, smart story that has just about everything.

The set-up, from the outset, is smart: Dudley Bose, an astronomer on a remote planet of the Commonwealth (humans have spread across the galaxy, courtesy of Ozzie Isaacs and Nigel Sheldon's interstellar wormhole technology) notes, one night, two stars suddenly disappearing from view.

At this point, Hamilton demonstrates his committment to physics in these books: the observation of the stars' disappearance is light-based. However, the wormholes allow Bose to travel to the other side of the Commonwealth faster than the light waves will, so that he can set up a full recording rig to preserve this singular event for posterity. Clever.

Anyway, this event naturally generates a lot of speculation and the conclusion is drawn that the two stars have been contained within a Dyson sphere. But to what end? To keep everyone else out? Or to keep whatever was inside in?

Humans, being humans, can't resist sticking their nose in to find out, so an expedition is mounted to the Dyson Pair, as they get called, and they unleash a malovelent species known as The Primes upon a Commonwealth ill-prepared to defend itself.

That's not the only tale being told, though... Hamilton, as with The Night's Dawn Trilogy, deploys a huge array of characters (some do feel a little familiar to veterans of Hamilton's ouevre, I confess), all of whom are involved in their own stories, in addition to being caught up in the whole business with the Primes.

Hamilton's really taken care to think about what kind of infrastructure it would take to support the Commonwealth - how the wormholes would work. What people would do with extended lifespans. What kind of environments there would be, and what individual planets' roles might be in a Commonwealth.

Seriously, this not only stands head and shoulders over all of Hamilton's other stuff, but it stands comparison with the best SF out there at the moment, IMHO.