[2] 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.
As part of the first mission to Mars, a team of astronauts exits their spacecraft for the first time, only to see another man standing there, connected to an air hose that leads through a wormhole to a laboratory in California.
The wormhole generator's inventors, Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaac, chose to test it by beating the crew, by moments, to become the first humans to reach Mars.
When the Second Chance arrives and begins to explore what appears to be an enclosure generator, an unknown mechanism shuts it down and the barrier around the star disappears.
They consist of intelligent "immotiles" that breed and control vast armies of sub-sentient "motiles" via electronically extended neural interfaces.
Primes had previously colonised the solar system referred to as Dyson Beta using slower-than-light starships and had committed genocide against its native inhabitants in the process.
Disconnected from their originating immotile groupings, and provided with novel biological forms, Beta's Primes started to routinely alter themselves through genetic manipulation and mechanical augmentation.
Meanwhile, the humans in the remaining Commonwealth pursue other plans: to develop a set of weapons and warships to defend against the next Prime invasion and force the conflict back into Prime space; to develop a "quantumbuster superweapon" based on technology supplied, unbeknownst to most humans, by the Starflyer; and to prepare for the evacuation of known space altogether if necessary.
As the war rages, the human forces begin to build much faster, better armed ships and fitting them with new "quantumbuster" weapons that can destroy an entire planet.
After crashing on Far Away, it has been plotting how to destroy both the Alpha Primes as well as dangerous humanity by manipulating events to force both races to commit mutual genocide.
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.