Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton

Fleeing a ravaged Earth, humanity launched near-lightspeed arkships across a large part of the galaxy. Many have vanished, some established isolated colonies in remote systems, but the greatest success was in the Centauri Cluster, a group of millions of stars within a few hundred light-years of one another with thousands of habitable worlds between them. The Green Signal was sent across the galaxy to attract more arkships. But in the tens of thousands of years it took them to arrive, the humans of the Centauri Cluster become technologically advanced, becoming near godlike beings called the Celestials. The late-arriving humans, for whom only years or decades had passed at relativistic speeds since the fall of Earth, these Celestials might as well be a different species.

The arrival of the arkship Diligent in the Crown Dominion, the only Celestial empire to allow humans their own worlds, settlements and businesses, after 40,000 years in deep space at first seems like business as usual. But the owner-ruler of the Diligent is one of old Earth's most ruthless businessmen, who sees an opportunity in the ossified power structures of the Crown Dominion to further the cause of ordinary humans. At the same time, the arkship's arrival gives the rebellious son of a rich family an opportunity to become a Traveler, an interstellar starship captain. Elsewhere, a police officer is recruited by a Celestial archon to become his eyes and ears in the Crown Dominion's home system, and a potential recruit to succeed a Celestial ruler sets about her destiny with impressive ruthlessness. Both within and outside the borders of the Crown Dominion, threats are gathering which could change - or obliterate - the fate of billions, humans and Celestials alike.

Peter F. Hamilton, Britain's biggest-selling living science fiction author, is known for his brick-thick, far-future space operas featuring living starships, immense space battles and impeccable worldbuilding. His most recent space opera trilogy, The Salvation Sequence (Salvation, Salvation Lost, The Saints of Salvation), operated on a different level, with three relatively constrained novels working with a tight focus to deliver a very effective storyline. It worked very well, but arguably lacked the epic grandeur of his best work.

The Archimedes Engine cheerfully throws that approach out of the window and slams down the accelerator. This is, once again, a huge (900 pages in hardcover), dizzyingly epic space opera which swaps between a large number of storylines, planets and starships, with a meticulously constructed plot that combines breathless action setpices with impressively atmospheric worldbuilding. Hamilton hasn't delivered a book quite like this since 2004's Pandora's Star and 1996's The Reality Dysfunction, so it's impressive to see that, twenty years on, he's still got it.

The Archimedes Engine does have one major differences to his earlier work though: this is, to some degree, a collaborative project. It is part of the wider Exodus project which also incorporates an episode of Amazon's recent Secret Level animated series (Exodus: Odyssey) and a forthcoming, massive video game RPG from the same team as Mass Effect. Reading interviews with the creatives, it seems that they came up with the underlying concepts and gave them to Hamilton to flesh out, with them then providing guidance on those ideas. The result is an impressive amount of worldbuilding, since it is needed to drive not just this novel, but TV and video game projects as well.

The core principle of the setting is incredibly straightforward: FTL (faster than light) travel is utterly impossible. Spacecraft are limited to the speed of light. There are "Gates of Heaven," incredibly powerful devices which can accelerate spacecraft to 99.99% of lightspeed in an instant (that's 500,000 gees, thank you very much) without obliterating them, but that's about it. Starship crews buzz around at relativistic speeds, with only a few days or weeks passing for their crews as they travel from one system to another, but potentially years at a time passing for their friends and family back home. Even a round-trip to a star a modest fifteen light-years away will see at least thirty years, a quarter of a human lifetime in this time, elapse for those left behind. This makes it incredibly important to work out which journeys are necessary and which are not; an early meeting in the book, which takes three years out of someone's life, feels like it could have been an email, which is even more annoying in this context.

Hamilton's not actually done this before, his previous work has largely relied on FTL travel, usually via wormholes, so seeing him track where his characters are as decades pass for them is quite interesting (his friend Alastair Reynolds is more of a dab hand at this, as his signature Revelation Space setting similarly lacks FTL travel). To some degree the action in the book is largely constrained to the Kelowan system, which limits the problem, but several subplots do see trips to other star systems, allowing decades to pass when they return. Fortunately this is a setting where people like to set in motion very long-term plots.

Hamilton juggles a huge number of plots, subplots, characters and worldbuilding information with typical aplomb. For all the praise given to Brandon Sanderson and Steven Erikson for this, I think Hamilton has them both beat when it comes to building a series of wildly disparate threads over the better part of a thousand pages only for them to converge with a titanic clash at the end. The Archimedes Engine is no different, with storylines that seem utterly disconnected colliding with the force of matter and antimatter, leaving the reader eager for the sequel (though you'll have to wait until late 2025 for that).

As an author, Hamilton does have a number of long-standing, almost infamous weaknesses. One is that no matter how far future, bizarre or strange the setting, his characters can have a tendency to break down into English idioms, sayings and insults. This is a nice change from SF novels which have characters doing the same thing with American vocabulary, but can be a bit distracting. Fortunately, his other infamous (though probably over-stated, especially in his later work) tendency towards sex scenes of wildly variable plot relevance is here altogether missing. Characters hook up, but tasteful fades to black are the order of the day. Also, for some reason, Hamilton seems to have lost faith in his recurring plot device of a benevolent billionaire/trillionaire who helps save the human race from the goodness of his heart, so our stand-in in that role in this book is a much more morally grey character.

Where the book is a bit more variable is the quality of the characters. Thyra, the would-be-heir to the crown of Wynid who has to fight against her low rank of birth to gain her Queen/Mother's favour, is probably the standout here, but she does take a back seat in the back half of the book. Finn is the very beige young callow youth protagonist who goes on a wild adventure (this book's Joshua Calvert), though he works enough as a bit of a blank slate for the reader to experience the crazy universe through. I'm more surprised that Hamilton didn't do more with Ellie, the Diligent crewmember we spend the most time with, though mostly not as a POV character. As someone who's spent her life on a low-tech arkship, she's probably better-placed to act as our eyes and ears in the setting, but perhaps that would have been too obvious. It's Gahji, the Celestial politician trying to make sense of the increasingly weird goings-on, and Terence Wilson-Fletcher, police detective (and our spiritual surrogate for the Commonwealth universe's Paula Myo, still Hamilton's finest character creation) who emerge as the most interesting protagonists. Other characters descend into the usual morass of petty criminals, scheming politicians and greedy businessmen. It works well, but isn't his most vivid cast.

The Archimedes Engine (****½) is Peter F. Hamilton back on top form, doing what he does best: large-scale, epic space opera, in a well-realised setting, with a huge, multi-faceted plot that builds and concludes hugely satisfyingly at the end. This is the first in a duology, so there is a significant cliffhanger. The second book, The Helium Sea, seems tentatively scheduled for later this year. The book is available now worldwide.

Exodus, the video game, is currently unscheduled but likely to arrive in 2026 or 2027. There is a significant amount of worldbuilding and background information that can be seen on Archetype Entertainment's website.

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