WOW. Pandora's Star is a EPIC space opera. It has everything you could want from a space opera. Huge elaborate worlds,(strange) Aliens, Robots, Space-Battles, Politics,Intrigues and a lot of characters. You really need to concentrate reading this, because there are a lot of different storylines with many characters on lots of worlds. Nearly each of the 26 chapters starts with big info dump over 5-10 pages, describing for example the world, its history or political system. Even though this puts a hard break on the flow of the story you get a wonderfully rich and thoughout world in return. Peter F. Hamilton tells his story really well and you won't get bored. Interesting characters and the need to know what the fuck is happening got me hooked pretty quickly and I had to read the last 200 pages in one go. Be warned though. It ends with a remarkably similar cliffhanger as The Daylight War. I guess you should look at the Commonwealth Saga as one book with 2k pages.