** spoiler alert ** I finished reading Peter Hamilton's Judas Unchained last night, and it was good. This is the sequel/conclusion to Pandora's Star, and it opens pretty much right where Pandora left off.

There were a few surprises: Mellanie becomes a much stronger character, and we finally get an explanation for where the hell Ozzie has gotten himself off to. There is one glaring issue with the book, however: the climactic battle involves whether to use a weapon which will completely wipe out the MorningLightMountain star system - destroying the star itself, and putting a final end to the threat that the Prime had been to all of human civilization, and the option of re-enclosing the system in the Dyson sphere is portrayed as a more-humane, more moral, non-genocidal [sic: properly xenocidal] option.

This is, of course, idiotic frippery.

MorningLightMountain was directly responsible for the deaths of millions of humans, and the destruction of all earth-normative life on 71 planets (via induced solar flare to sterilize the systems). It had already (in the first book) been accidentally released from the Dyson sphere before, and it had successfully seeded other star systems with its spores. So, what precisely is to stop one of the other Prime Immotiles on the outside from re-opening the prison? Further, even if the attempt at containment is successful, how is this more moral? "Successful" containment means that the barrier outlasts the lifespan of the star, and so MorningLightMountain would have a few billion years to steadily run out of resources and starve to death in the eventual inevitable solar decay. That's like viewing life in prison without the possibility of parole as being more moral than execution, and that doesn't withstand much scrutiny.

Further: this isn't a case where there's any accidental punishment involved - MLM, as a singular entity, was responsible for the destruction of all of the other independent Immotiles on Prime, and was personally responsible for the unprovoked assault on the human commonwealth. Is there the possibility of redemption? No, not really - it's given a nod via the Bose motile, but that fails the sniff test: what possible redemption is possible for the murder of millions of people? For the annihilation of whole biospheres? Evil on that magnitude is not within the grasp of the human experience: would we say that a Stalin or a Hitler should be imprisoned rather than executed? Worse, what if the war is still going on, and there is a decent chance that imprisonment might not work?

Consider a related example: the Borg cube, after blowing the hell out of the Federation fleet, has almost made it to Earth, and it intends absolute annihilation of humanity. Should the Enterprise, after disabling the cube, destroy it, killing the organism?

Answer: duh. Of course they should. Orson Scott Card created the hierarchy of exclusion, and MorningLightMountain clearly falls under the category Djur. Communication is absolutely possible, but compromise is not - MLM stated its intention to annihilate all other entities from the galaxy, and was attempting to live up to its threat.

So how in the living hell can imprisonment be an answer here? I'll pull a line from James Cameron: "nuke it from orbit - it's the only way to be sure" (except in this case, that's highly insufficient).