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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The Saints of Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton

The alien Olyix are besieging Earth, whose great cities stand protected by forcefields, each one powered by a quantum entanglement portal leading to distant colony worlds. One-by-one the fields and the cities they protect are failing, the inhabitants captured and cocooned for an unknown fate. The defenders of Earth are preparing to launch a counter-attack, knowing they are only buying time for the great exodus fleets which are hurtling into deep space, intending to preserve humanity for the eventual fight back. In the distant future that fight is now underway, with myriad different human societies and several alien species allying for a direct strike on the Olyix home system. If they succeed, they will free trillions of lives from imprisonment; if they fail, the galaxy will be subjected to a reign of religious terror. Key to the victory are the Saints, the first human to recognise the threat of the Olyix, and whose fates remain a mystery.

Peter F. Hamilton has spent more than a quarter of a century writing a potent combination of science fiction, mixing formidable scientific and technology speculation with fiendish readability and accessibility, along with characters who remain sympathetic and human in their motivations. Whether it's near-future techno-noirs thriller or far-future, posthuman cosmic epics, his ability to write page-turning novels remains undimmed.

The Salvation trilogy, here reaching a conclusion after Salvation (2018) and Salvation Lost (2019), is Hamilton working in a new setting and milieu, and shaking up his standard space opera format with some interesting new structural techniques. This trilogy is notable both for its relative brevity - the trilogy as a whole is only slightly longer than one of his longest, shelf-annihilating single novels like The Naked God or Great North Road - and its clear focus with a restrained number of characters and subplots. Some fans may miss the vast array of characters and cultures clashing across multiple storylines, but others (particularly those with an aversion to books that threaten to break their wrists every time they pick them up) will find his sense of purpose in this trilogy is more preferable.

The first novel in the trilogy had a great, Hyperion-style focus on the individual "Saints," the humans who first discern the scale of the alien threat through their individual experiences, fleshed out in almost self-contained, backstory-heavy novellas. The second novel couldn't sustain that device but continued the structure from the first book between alternating between events in the early 23rd Century and an unclear period in the distant future, building up impressive narrative momentum between the two timelines. Some may wonder why Hamilton adopted that structure in lieu of a more linear narrative, but The Saints of Salvation makes the reasoning clear, and it's very impressively handled.

Hamilton does have a slight weakness with endings. His classic Night's Dawn Trilogy is oft-criticised for its maybe-too-neat ending, whilst the Commonwealth Saga duology's second book was decidedly weaker than the first. His later series have had stronger finales, but they were also somewhat slighter works without quite the same feeling of tense horror that he nailed in those earlier series. The Salvation Trilogy brings back the horror in spades and also nails its ending, delivering a massive, widescreen-style space opera finale with more explosions, hyper-advanced space battles and exotic technology than sometimes seems feasible.

There are hints that this isn't quite the end. Hamilton has expressed a preference for messier endings following The Night's Dawn, and the finale to this novel leaves several key questions open to speculation. Whether he intends to return to this universe with more books is unknown at present (Hamilton has projected possibly a different setting for his next work), but he leaves enough track laid to pursue future storylines there if possible.

Negatives are few. Perhaps the characters aren't quite as memorable as in his previous works (there's no equivalent of Paula Myo here), maybe the story hinging once again on an ultra-rich but fortunately benevolent super-corporation run by a quasi-immortal philanthropist is a bit of an overdone trope, maybe this last volume jettisons a few quieter character moments in favour of exposition, but it's hard to criticise a book which slams its foot to the accelerator and moves the plot to a grand crescendo without any filler. Certainly some of Hamilton's earlier weaknesses are long gone (the trilogy lacks any slightly embarrassing sex scenes you have to flick past, which bogged down some of his early work).

As it stands, The Saints of Salvation (****½) delivers an epic, fast-paced and well-characterised grand finale to an enjoyable trilogy. The trilogy isn't quite up to the engrossing scale of Hamilton's best work, but it's still one of the strongest space opera series of recent years. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Salvation Lost by Peter F. Hamilton

A salvage operation to a remote world has revealed a devastating secret: the alien Olyix, the supposed friends and allies of humanity, are an existential threat to the human race. Humanity is forewarned, but the Olyix are also aware that their deception has been exposed and unleash their forces. As all-out interstellar war begins, it will take every resource on Earth and its colonies to stave off the attack. Meanwhile, millennia in the distant future, humanity's descendants prepare to mount a last, desperate offensive against the Olyix...but they have some unexpected allies waiting in the wings.

Peter F. Hamilton's Salvation trilogy is Hamilton back to doing what he does best: combining the science fiction thriller and an epic space opera into an addictive narrative set in a richly-detailed future. Hamilton is the finest worldbuilder in science fiction working today - perhaps ever - and his constant capacity for invention and storytelling remains unmatched in the genre. When it comes to big-budget, high-concept, highly readable science fiction there is simply no other game in town at present.

Salvation marked the start of a new sequence and it's familiar territory for Hamilton: painting a picture of a futuristic human society which is suddenly put in peril and a disparate group of characters scattered across many fronts has to respond to the threat. It recalled his two finest novels, The Reality Dysfunction and Pandora's Star, but clocked in at considerably less than half the length of either of those novels, so benefited from the tighter focus. This is Hamilton doing his normal thing but slimmed down a lot.

As with the first novel, this book unfolds on multiple fronts simultaneously. We get to see the war between humanity and the Olyix beginning from the POVs of the characters from the first book and other powerful figures. We also get a continuation from the story of the first book of the far-future humans fighting a war across an almost unimaginable timescale, with battles separated by centuries or millennia and the overall shape of the conflict hard to discern. This conflict, which is more cosmic in scale, feels a bit different to Hamilton's other work and is arguably the freshest aspect of this new series.

A new storyline also begins in this book, with a bunch of low-level London criminals providing a ground level view of the unfolding conflict and how they get more involved in it. I felt this storyline was a bit less interesting, mainly because all of the characters involved in it were morally irredeemable thugs. The attempts at moral complexity - giving one of the characters an elderly and failing relative and showing his plans to escape from the criminal world - aren't handled very well and I ended up not particularly caring about this storyline very much, especially as in a relatively short novel (if only by Hamilton's normal rhinoceros-stunning standards) it felt like page time that could have been spent on the other two, considerably better storylines. Some may also feel that some Hamiltonian tropes are a bit over-indulged here, such as once again the fate of humanity resting with an ultra-rich but ultimately benevolent super-corporation run by a semi-immortal philanthropist.

Still, Salvation Lost (****) is fiendishly readable and compelling (I read it in one sitting), intelligent and features a scope and scale unusual for Hamilton whilst simultaneously being a lot shorter and more focused than most of his prior work. The novel is available now in the UK and USA. The concluding book in the series, The Saints of Salvation, will be released next year.

Love, Death and Robots: Volume 1

Love, Death and Robots is a series of short animated films, mostly based on short fiction published by established science fiction and fantasy authors, and marks a collaboration between Netflix, David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) and Tim Miller (Deadpool). There are eighteen short films in total, marking the first time that SF stalwarts Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds and John Scalzi have seen their work adapted for the screen.

Sonnie's Edge, based on a Hamilton short story from his Night's Dawn universe (and available in A Second Chance at Eden), is a hyper-violent thriller set in late 21st Century London. It depicts a battle to the death between two genetically-engineered monsters, controlled by human "operators" via the affinity gene (which plays a much larger role in the novels). It's a short, simple story with a killer twist that survives the translation to the screen, although the visceral nature of the violence is quite startling.

Three Robots, based on a Scalzi short, is arguably one of the best films in the collection, and easily the funniest. Three robots land on a post-apocalyptic Earth to take a tour guide of the ruins of human civilisation. There's plenty of paths and comedy, along with an amusing ending. It makes the other two Scalzi offerings, When the Yogurt Took Over and Alternate Histories, feel amusing but slight, short and inoffensive in comparison.

The Witness, written and directed by Alberto Mieglo (one of the visual consultants on Into the Spider-Verse), is one of only two originals in the collection and it is comfortably the worst of the stories by quite a margin. The SF nature of the story is only implied and otherwise the episode is an excuse for an extended chase sequence through some very sleazy locations for no readily apparent reason. The animation style is quite breathtaking, but that doesn't help the short survive when it is in the service of a story this thin.

The other original story for the series, Blindspot (by Vitaliy Shushko), is fun with some good character interplay, but it also ends up feeling a bit underdeveloped. It might have been better to have given these two slots to other modern SF authors to adapt more stories (I could see one of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha short stories being exceptional in this kind of adaptation, for example).

Suits, based on a Steven Lewis short, is another of the strongest films in the series. The story feels like it takes inspiration from the original StarCraft, with hard-working homesteaders defending their crops from a rapacious alien horde with some impressive battlemech suits. There's some deft characterisation and some great action sequences in this story, although the "twist" ending is a little rudimentary by SF standards.

Beyond the Aquila Rift is the first Alastair Reynolds story to make it to the screen, and they chose a good one. A starship drifts off course due to a warp jump mishap and arrives at a remote space station, with remote chances of rescue or escape. The captain tries to adjust to life, especially after an immense coincidence means he knows one of the people on the station. A brooding sense of mystery ends in outright existential horror. This would be one of the strongest stories in the series, if it weren't for a number of totally superfluous sex scenes which eat up the screen time to no dramatic benefit. The other Reynolds short, Zima Blue, is also very good, but suffers a little dramatically from being a story that's more told than shown.

Ken Liu's Good Hunting, a sort-of cybernetic fairy tale set in a chronologically ambiguous Hong Kong, is another one of the strongest stories in the batch, a fever dream melding fantasy, technology and romance.

The Dump, by Joe Lansdale, is impressively animated but otherwise feels a little pointless. His other story, Fish Night, is more obtuse from a plot perspective, but it is visually beautiful and amusing.

Another three strong stories in the series follow military personnel: Marko Kloos's Shape-Shifters is about werewolves openly serving in the US Army in Afghanistan; Lucky 13 (also by Kloos) is a terrific story about the bond between a pilot and her dropship (there's a distinct Aliens colonial marines vibe to this story which is cool); and David Amendola's Secret War is a terrific story about Soviet soldiers who uncover a horrifying secret in the Siberian wilderness. All three stories are a little bit "video game cut scene CGI," but the character work and action in all three stories is remarkable.

Ice Age, based on a Michael Swanwick short story, is the only one of the set to use a live-action framing device. A young couple, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Topher Grace, discover than a entire civilisation exists inside their freezer in a time-accelerated state and became witnesses to the civilisation's rise and fall over time. It's a fun story.

Sucker of Souls by Kirsten Cross is an enjoyable but fairly standard horror story. Helping Hand, by Claudine Griggs, is a much stronger, hard SF story. Feeling a bit like an addendum to the movie Gravity, it features a maintenance worker who gets into trouble in Earth orbit, and is a terrific slice of classic, old-skool short SF.

Overall, the series is successful in that it brings some genuinely innovative and interesting SF ideas, crafted by some of the strongest writers the genre has at its disposal, and gets them on screen with arresting and often breathtaking visuals. Some of the stories don't work - The Witness is particularly pointless - and one might wish for a broader range of authors (do we really need three Scalzi stories?) but for the most part, the first season of Love, Death and Robots (****) is a success. A second season has been commissioned.

Netflix's LOVE, DEATH & ROBOTS brings some of SFF's biggest names to the screen

Tomorrow (Friday 15 March), Netflix are releasing a new series called Love, Death and Robots. An anthology series, it showcases eighteen short (5-15 minute) SF films about the title concepts, based on short fiction by some of SFF's biggest names, as well as some films by concept artists.

Executive produced by David Fincher, the anthology series features the following stories with the confirmed writers so far:

Sonnie's Edge by Peter F. Hamilton (set in the universe of The Night's Dawn Trilogy)

Three Robots by John Scalzi
The Witness by Alberto Mieglo

Suits

Sucker of Souls

When the Yogurt Took Over by John Scalzi

Beyond the Aquila Rift by Alastair Reynolds

Good Hunting

The Dump

Shape-Shifters

Helping Hand

Fish Night by Joe Lansdale

Lucky 13

Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds

Blind Spot

Ice Age

Alternate Histories by John Scalzi

Secret War

Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton

AD 2204. A derelict alien spacecraft has been found on a remote planet. A group of explorers are gathered together to investigate the wreck and the strange secrets it contains. For each of them, it has been a strange and stressful road that has led to this time and place. And, centuries in the future, they are revered as the “Five Saints” for the actions they are about to take…

Salvation is the first novel in both a new series and a new universe for Britain’s most successful living SF author, Peter F. Hamilton. It’s also a novel that mixes Hamilton’s well-known strengths – in-depth SF worldbuilding, an epic narrative, the meticulous construction of intriguing mysteries, his skill at both the long-form novel and short stories – with a new approach which splits the story into three distinct strands.

In the first approach, we have the “modern-day” storyline about the gathering of the protagonists (of which there are six; the disparity between the number of characters and the later veneration of five of them is the first clue that something odd is going on) and their deployment to the alien crash site. This story is told in the first person from one of the team and is interesting enough, although it really only serves as a framing device. In the second part of the story we get a lengthy flashback from each character about a key event in their lives, one that also defined who they are but also ties in directly with the over-arching mystery. This section feels a lot like Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (itself inspired by Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales) and is where Hamilton gets a bit structurally interesting, as he combines the six apparently unrelated novella-length narratives into one story.

In the third section, it’s centuries or millennia in the distant future and the human race seems to be in desperate straits. This part of the story is most baffling, initially, due to a lack of context, but as the story unfolds the reader can start to put together the pieces. This results in impressive foreshadowing.

Hamilton moves between the three plot strands with skillful economy – at 530 pages this may not be a short book, but it’s positively a novella compared to so some Hamilton books (the longest of which are more than twice this size) – building up this new vision of the future. It’s a much less advanced vision than either the Confederation of the Night’s Dawn series or the Commonwealth of much of the rest of his fiction, but it’s still a big, brash and optimistic view. The key invention this time around is the quantum entanglement portal, which stands in for the wormholes of his earlier books. In practical terms they are similar, but they have a limitation in that twinned portals have to be created together and then one of them physically moved to the destination to be set up (it can’t be generated from light-years away). They are also much less energy-dependent, meaning that portals are set up everywhere, allowing someone to commute to work in London from their flat in Glasgow in five minutes. The super-rich even have “portalhomes”, where one bedroom might be in New York City but the bathroom is in Antarctica. It’s a fun concept that Hamilton explores to the hilt.

There’s also a foreboding tone to events. Hamilton is building up to something quite terrible happening between the present and far future storylines, and it’s not until late in the book we get an inkling of what that might be. Of course, the book ends on a cliffhanger just as we get to that point. The good news is that the second book, Salvation Lost, is almost finished already and locked for release in 2019, with The Saints of Salvation to wrap things up in (presumably) 2020.

Character-wise, Salvation probably lacks a figure as dynamic and memorable as Paula Myo, Ozzie or Syrinx, but the Canterbury Tales-style structure does allow each of the major characters to be painted in a lot of depth with their backstories and motivations fleshed out. There are also political and ideological differences between the group, which have to be overcome for them to work out what is going on.

The far future storyline is a lot weirder, with characters being trained to face an enemy who may not appear in their lifetimes, but Hamilton sells the weirdness quite well, even if the characters aren’t quite as engaging this time around.

Salvation (****) is in many ways classic Hamilton: bold, brash, epic, optimistic and packed with great worldbuilding and ideas. It’s also structurally original (for him), relatively constrained in scope and page-count and builds up a terrific momentum which is only arrested by the all-too-soon ending. On the negative side of things, the characters perhaps aren’t among Hamilton’s best and although quantum-entanglement portals may not be wormholes, they are very similar and it does feel like Hamilton is revisiting well-trodden ground here. Still, it’s a compelling, rich SF novel. It is available now in the UK and USA.

Night Without Stars by Peter F. Hamilton

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the planet Bienvenido was expelled from the Void, ending up orbiting a lonely star in intergalactic space, 23 million light-years from the Milky Way galaxy. The people of Bienvendio lost their Void-imbued telepathic powers but regained the ability to develop technology. They now go into battle against the alien Fallers using jet aircraft and primitive space rockets. And they are still, gradually, losing the war. The arrival of a child from the Commonwealth acts as a catalyst for the final showdown between humans and Fallers, a battle that the humans cannot afford to lose.

Night Without Stars is a more momentous book than it first appears. It's the second half of the Chronicle of the Fallers duology which began with The Abyss Beyond Dreams, but it's also the eighth and - reportedly - concluding novel set in the Commonwealth universe. Hamilton kicked off this setting with 2002's stand-alone, near-future novel Misspent Youth before taking it into far-future space opera territory with the excellent Pandora's Star. Night Without Stars draws an end to this sequence of books, which is both a cause for disappointment - it still feels like there's a lot of untapped potential to the setting - and also excitement, as Hamilton will be moving into a new milieu for his next project, a new trilogy.

Night Without Stars is, again, mostly set in Bienvenido, but it's no longer the same planet we saw in Abyss. Being expelled from the Void means that its people can now develop electricity and industry, meaning high-powered machine guns, aircraft, motor vehicles, spacecraft (based on Soyuz space capsules)...and nukes. Unfortunately, it also means losing their telepathic powers which provided a more reliable means of exposing Fallers, hostile aliens able to mimic human form. Although the better technology makes it easier to eliminate the Fallers when they are found and to destroy their orbiting spacecraft, it cannot do anything to expose the Faller nests on the planet itself and the Faller numbers are multiplying.

As is his wont, Hamilton sets up an enormous, complicated and multi-stranded storyline and a large cast of characters and then orchestrates events like Napoleon sending troops into battle. We flip between different locations, characters and events with rapid and enviable ease, the plot building up an irresistible momentum in the process. Hamilton's characters are fairly standard archetypes and that continues here, with no major breakout personalities like the irrepressible Paula Myo (who still manages to check in, despite being 23 million light-years from where the action is), but they're a likable bunch: the back-country isolationist warden who inadvertently is given guardianship of the most important item on the planet; the gung-ho astronaut whose curiosity gets the better of him; and one of the survivors from the previous novel who is functionally immortal and indestructible, but finds that is no help whatsoever in solving the Faller crisis once and for all.

Just as The Abyss Beyond Dreams melded hard, posthuman SF with steampunk, so Night Without Stars switches things up by introducing historical elements. Bienvenido's technology has reached the level of the 1950s or 1960s, which is a big improvement on where they were but still not good enough to stop the alien menace, putting our Commonwealth-born heroes used to instant teleportation and traversing the galaxy in weeks on the back foot. There's also the problem that Bienvendio's government is an effective dictatorship, but Hamilton clearly had his fill of ideological battles in the previous novel. This time around there are musings on whether the planet could survive as a democracy given the overwhelming threat of the Fallers, but overall there is less of a political bent to this novel than the previous one.

Where there is a tremendous, relentless sense of pace. The novel takes place in a period of about four weeks and once it gets going in the first few pages, it just does not stop. Catastrophes multiply, pages fly past and the book become fiendishly addictive. This is typical of Hamilton and if Night isn't quite as unputdownable as his finest novels - The Reality Dysfunction and Pandora's Star - it's still nipping at their heels. This is a 700-page hardcover novel that feels as tightly-paced and immaculately-structured as the finest 300-page thriller.

Some weaknesses do creep in. There is the feeling that the Fallers could really have won the conflict at almost any time since the events of Abyss and the timing of events is a little on the convenient side. There's also the sheer number of flukes of good luck our heroes have in finding a final solution to the crisis. The fact that our Commonwealth characters are functionally immortal - if they failed and all died then they would be re-lifed at some future point - does also remove some tension from proceedings even if human immortality is a core feature of the setting. Finally, the chapters set back in the Commonwealth feel like a slight indulgence. Understandably so, if this is indeed the final Commonwealth novel, but characters from as far back as Misspent Youth showing up does feel a little random without this knowledge. More seriously, it feels like the Commonwealth has become as immortal and unbeatable as Iain M. Banks's Culture at this point, and a bit more of an interrogation of the society's problems would be interesting beyond the occasional character musing it can be a bit boring.

But ultimately Night Without Stars (****½) is standard and classic Peter F. Hamilton: bursting at the seams with good ideas, unfolding with a relentless and unstoppable pace, and it's just a tremendously fun and smart piece of SF. The novel will be released next week in both the UK and USA.

New cover art: Peter F. Hamilton's NIGHT WITHOUT STARS

Tor UK have revealed the UK cover art for Night Without Stars, the forthcoming second part of Peter F. Hamilton's Chronicle of the Fallers duology.

Cover blurb:

"The planet of Bienvenido is on its own, isolated from the rest of the universe. And it’s waging war against the ruthless Fallers, aliens which have evolved to conquer whole worlds. Kysandra is leading an underground resistance, aided by biological enhancements that give her a crucial edge. But she fears she’s fighting a losing battle. This is especially as the government hampers her efforts at every turn, blinded by crippling technophobia and prejudices against enhanced 'Eliter' humans. However, if the resistance and government can’t work together, humanity on this planet will face extinction – for the Fallers are organizing a final, decisive invasion. Bienvenido badly needs outside help. But the Commonwealth, with all its technological expertise, has been lost to them for generations. Desperate times will call for desperate measures, or humanity on Bienvenido will not survive."

Night Without Stars will be published on 22 September this year.

The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter F. Hamilton

AD 3326. Nigel Sheldon, the originator of wormhole technology and the person responsible for the creation of the Intersolar Commonwealth, is semi-retired and planning to leave this galaxy for a new one. However, his plans are interrupted by the enigmatic Raiel, the powerful aliens who guard the Milky Way from the expansion of the Void, the mysteriously growing mini-universe hidden in the galactic core. The Raiel need Sheldon to go into the Void and help recover one of their ancient warships. Sheldon agrees...but soon finds himself on the wrong planet in the wrong time and the only way out is to support a full-scale revolution.

The Abyss Beyond Dreams is the first novel in a duology, to be followed by Night Without Stars. This series, The Chronicle of the Fallers, is the latest work in Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth universe. Familiarity with the previous works in this universe (the Commonwealth Saga duology and the Void Trilogy) is recommended as this book contains spoilers for the earlier ones, but is not strictly essential.

As with the preceding Void Trilogy, this novel is divided into two sections and almost two distinct genres. In the opening sequence we have far-future SF, set thirteen centuries hence when humanity is immortal, can cross the galaxy in a matter of weeks and live any kind of life imaginable. The bulk of the book is set within the Void itself, where high technology does not work but the inhabitants gain the powers of telepathy and telekinesis. Whilst the Void sequence was set on Querencia, which was more of a fantasy setting, the Fallers books are set on Bienvenido. Unlike Querencia, where a lot of history was lost after the human refugees settled on it, Bienvenido has maintained more of a history and identify, as well as a slightly higher level of technology. This gives the novel more of a steampunk feel, allowing Hamilton to mix up some more genres.

The Abyss Beyond Dreams starts off by feeling a little bit too much like The Dreaming Void. One of our primary POVs is Svlasta, a soldier wounded in battle with the mysterious Fallers (hostile aliens who can assume human appearance) who soon becomes the architect of social change. The similarities with Edeard's story in the earlier books are uncanny. However, Hamilton is clever enough to subvert the reader's expectations and soon moves off in another direction. It's not long before we're meeting some clever (and very conscious) Russian Revolution parallels and seeing how all revolutions carry within them their own capacity for self-destruction.

As usual, Hamilton's prose is unornamented but highly readable. His characters are well-delineated, although they're all a little too prone to using British swear words and idioms. The book is structurally similar to the Void novels but this is deliberate and soon used to set up and then undercut expectations in an interesting way. There are a few complaints, however. One of these is how quickly the ending unfolds (bordering on the abrupt) and how rapidly one of our main characters descends into outright madness. Whilst foreshadowed earlier on, the actual transition feels a little too rapid.

Another is only an issue for long-standing fans. The Commonwealth universe is undeniably a fascinating place, but we've now spent four (out of a planned five) big novels on the subject of the Void. Given the size and variety of the Commonwealth, it would be nice to see more of it than this same bit of it. I can see the fascination, as it allows the author to experiment with different genres without having to fully abandon his SF roots to do it, but there is the feeling that it would be nice to wrap up the Void and move on. The next book in the series will hopefully do just that.

Otherwise, The Abyss Beyond Dreams (****) is a very solid Hamilton SF novel: big ideas, fun characters and affecting moments of gut-wrenching horror. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

UK cover art for THE ABYSS BEYOND DREAMS

Peter F. Hamilton has revealed the cover art for his next big SF novel, The Abyss Beyond Dreams:

This novel is the first half of The Chronicle of the Fallers, a new duology set in the Commonwealth/Void universe. It will be released on 9 October this year. Hamilton has announced a lengthy UK book tour to celebrate the novel's release.

Cover art for Peter F. Hamilton's new novel

Del Rey have released the American cover art for Peter F. Hamilton's new epic SF novel, The Abyss Beyond Dreams, the first novel in The Chronicle of the Fallers duology.

They also have a bare-bones plot summary:

The first of a two-book science fiction series set in New York Times bestselling author Hamilton's acclaimed Commonwealth universe. Thriller writer Ken Follett calls Peter F. Hamilton "the owner of the most powerful imagination in science fiction."

A clash of cultures in the Void pits humanity against a shape-changing alien species, and sees if two warring races can ever cooperate enough to free themselves from their mutual prison.

Story Locale: Space

Series Overview: Peter F. Hamilton returns to the Commonwealth universe with a clash of cultures in the Void that pits humanity against a shape-changing alien species.

The book will be published on 21 October this year, with an estimated hardcover page count of 672 pages. According to Hamilton, the book clocks in at around 198,000 words, surprisingly concise by his standards (The Naked God came in at almost 450,000 words and approximately 1,150 pages in hardcover). The UK edition, from Pan Macmillan, should be out around the same time.

Peter F. Hamilton update

An update on Peter F. Hamilton's writing projects for this year:

 
Queen of Dreams, the first novel in Peter F. Hamilton's Book of the Realms trilogy for younger readers, is out now. There are two more books to follow in the trilogy, already written and completed.

The Abyss Beyond Dreams is Hamilton's next adult SF novel. It is the first in a series called Chronicle of the Fallers and is set in the Commonwealth Universe, the setting for the Commonwealth Saga and Void Trilogy. This series is expected to be a duology, with Book 2 called The Night Without Stars. As of last month, Hamilton had almost completed the novel and it is anticipated for publication in September or October of this year. The Night Without Stars should follow in mid-2016.

Peter F. Hamilton charity auction

SF author Peter F. Hamilton is auctioning off a copy of his next book, The Queen of Dreams, for charity. This will be a proof signed by Hamilton and also by the four children who inspired the main characters in the book. The cause is Hamilton's friend Kate Cadman, who is raising money to enter the London Marathon and run in the name of the National Deaf Children's Society. The auction will run for ten days from 1 September.

More information on Peter's site, the Unisphere and Kate Cadman's JustGiving page.

New cover art for Peter F. Hamilton's NIGHT'S DAWN TRILOGY

Via Walker of Worlds, Peter F. Hamilton's superb Night's Dawn Trilogy is getting some new UK cover art, courtesy of new artist Steve Stone:

The rejacketing of the books should be complete by the end of the year. To be honest, I'm not that impressed by the covers. Compare them to the existing, original cover art by Jim Burns:

If Stone was depicting different scenes - and there are literally dozens of scenes in each novel which could serve for interesting cover art - I could understand the reason for the change. As it stands, he's painted the exact same scenes - the space battle over Lalonde, the Edenist habitats and ships near Jupiter and a Kiint floating city - but in rather less-interesting ways. Totally redundant. At least the cover art for the limited edition Subterranean Press versions (by Tomislav Tikulin) went with different scenes and a different style:

Disappointing, and a bit of a missed opportunity, it has to be said.

New cover art

Some upcoming cover art, courtesy of Jussi at Westeros.org once more:

First up, the American cover for Blood of Dragons, the fourth volume in The Rain Wild Chronicles by Robin Hobb. This book is due for publication in the UK and USA in April 2013:

Next up is the American cover for Great North Road, Peter F. Hamilton's new massive SF epic. This book will be out in the USA in December this year (and September in the UK):

The final UK cover art for Iain M. Banks's The Hydrogen Sonata, the latest excursion to The Culture. This book will be out in the UK and USA in September this year:

Rounding things off is the UK artwork for The Dirty Streets of Heaven, the first in Tad Williams's new urban fantasy series. This book will be out in both the UK and USA in September as well:

Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2143. Detective Sid Hurst is called upon to investigate the unusually violent murder of a North. The Norths are a large family of clones who have forged a powerful, interstellar corporate empire. Twenty years ago another North was killed in the exact same manner on the world of St. Libra...but the woman responsible, Angela Tramelo, has spent two decades in prison, protesting her innocence and claiming that an alien lifeform was responsible.With mounting evidence that she may have been right, an expedition is mounted to St. Libra's wilderness hinterland to investigate further, even as Hurst's enquiries on Earth continue.

However, St. Libra, a planet twice the size of Earth circling Sirius, is a difficult world to survey. It's thick ring system inhibits the operation of orbiting satellites and the planet is already under investigation for its bizarre plant life (which cannot have evolved in the short lifespan of the system). The expedition soon finds itself operating in a wilderness far beyond any relief efforts, with something in the jungle stalking them.

Great North Road is the latest novel from Britain's biggest-selling science fiction author, Peter F. Hamilton. It's a stand-alone unconnected to any of his previous universes or series, so can be read in confidence that there are no cliffhanger endings lurking in wait. With my review copy clocking in at 1,087 pages (the final version may be slightly shorter, apparently) it's also a huge book, giving a lot of words to the pound. It's actually Hamilton's longest book since The Naked God, outstripping his previous seven novels in size (none of them particularly short either).

As usual with Hamilton's space operas, we are introduced to a large cast of characters who are divided up amongst several storylines. There are two primary plots: the investigation into the murder in Newcastle and the expedition on St. Libra, with a number of smaller subplots that are developed more concisely. There's also a complex backstory to the novel that is revealed gradually through strategically-placed flashback sequences. Hamilton is an old hand at both multi-stranded epic plotting and also depicting high-tech police investigations and Great North Road is a triumph in both departments. The pacing is pretty good as we move between characters and storylines and their individual pieces of the puzzle slot together nicely in moments of revelation.

Character-wise, it's a solid cast, although not Hamilton's best. We're lacking a character as vivid as Ozzie or Paula Myo (or as frustratingly punchable as Joshua Calvert) but otherwise they are an interesting bunch. Angela Tramelo is embittered from her two decades in prison (not to mention effective torture by a shadowy government agency), but also has herself to blame for her lack of cooperation when that could have vindicated her much earlier. The reasons for this form a mystery that gradually unfolds over the course of the novel. Sid Hurst is a reliable protagonist as the detective investigating the murder, although his house-hunting woes (Hamilton continuing a slightly random theme of futuristic property market musings that began in The Dreaming Void) take up a fair bit of space that could have been trimmed. Vance Elston, the leader of the St. Libra expedition, is also a key protagonist and Hamilton uses him to return to one of his favourite topics, the place of religious faith in a science-driven world.

The science is a mix of the fairly basic and the advanced, speculative. The basic science comes from the history of observations of Sirius, which, if you accept the history at face value, is fairly bizarre. The presence of a fairly complex system of planets orbiting Sirius is also something Hamilton almost cheekily sneaks in: due to Sirius's size and type, detecting planets circling it through current methods has proven almost impossible, giving him a window to make up his own planetary system. The more speculative science applies to his traditional use of quantum and wormhole physics. As in his earlier novels, Hamilton brusquely describes his advanced scientific concepts in a straightforward manner that renders them fairly understandable to the reader. Unfortunately, he does commit one error when he fails to take into account relativity during a sublight interstellar voyage, which is a bit of an elementary mistake. Fortunately, it is not of major importance to the storyline.

In most respects, this is Peter F. Hamilton at his traditional, page-turning, easily-readable, SF blockbuster best. Unfortunately this extends to his traditional problem of including a number of sex scenes that add little to the narrative. It's not as prevalent an issue as it has been in the past (and we're fortunately still a long way from the dissolute Misspent Youth) but there are still a few scenes where characters start disrobing and the reader has to groan as the more interesting SF stuff is put on hold for a few paragraphs. Hamilton's other notable problem of how he ends his novels also rears its head here. In general terms the ending is fine and well-foreshadowed, but it does seem to almost be implausibly happy given the body count in the story and is certainly rather abrupt (something a character even half-apologetically notes). However, the storyline is mostly wrapped up satisfyingly, with only a couple of minor elements that could have been explored a bit thoroughly.

Overall, Great North Road (****) is a very solid novel. It's not amongst his best, but it rattles along at a good pace and handles its immense length quite well. It's also great to read a book where Hamilton is able to combine his mastery of epic plotting with a definitive ending. The novel will be published on 27 September in the UK and on 26 December in the USA.

Source: I received an advance review copy of this novel from the UK publishers.

Peter F. Hamilton update

Peter F. Hamilton has provided an update about his current and future writing projects. His next novel will be Great North Road, a massive (350,000-word) stand-alone SF book out in September.

Hamilton has also completed Queen of Dreams, the first in a trilogy called Book of the Realms. This is a fantasy children's book series (not YA, it's aimed at 8-12-year olds) and the books are very short by his standards (the first book is only 52,000 words). He hopes to complete the entire trilogy by the end of this year, presumably for 2013 publication if all goes well.

The next project will be The Fallers, originally envisaged as a trilogy but now possibly a duology. This sequence will be set in the Void some time between The Commonwealth Saga and The Void Trilogy. Amongst other things, the fate of Nigel Sheldon will apparently by explored in this new sequence. I suspect we won't see the first book in that series until 2014 at the earliest.

Final cover art for Peter F. Hamilton's GREAT NORTH ROAD

Via the Unisphere, we have the final cover art for Peter F. Hamilton's Great North Road (click for larger versions):

  

The cover art is by Steve Stone and will grace the British edition of the novel, to be published by Macmillan in hardcover on 27 September. Here's the cover with the full blurb:

Cover art and blurb for Peter F. Hamilton's GREAT NORTH ROAD

One of the biggest SFF releases of 2012 will be Great North Road, a stand-alone SF novel from Peter F. Hamilton and his longest novel since The Night's Dawn Trilogy.

Cover blurb:

In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, AD 2142, Detective Sidney Hurst attends a brutal murder scene. The victim is one of the wealthy North family clones – but none have been reported missing. And the crime’s most disturbing aspect is how the victim was killed. Twenty years ago, a North clone billionaire and his household were horrifically murdered in exactly the same manner, on the tropical planet of St Libra. But if the murderer is still at large, was Angela Tramelo wrongly convicted? Tough and confident, she never waivered under interrogation – claiming she alone survived an alien attack. But there is no animal life on St Libra. Investigating this alien threat becomes the Human Defence Agency’s top priority. The bio-fuel flowing from St Libra is the lifeblood of Earth’s economy and must be secured. So a vast expedition is mounted via the Newcastle gateway, and teams of engineers, support personnel and xenobiologists are dispatched to the planet. Along with their technical advisor, grudgingly released from prison, Angela Tramelo. But the expedition is cut off, deep within St Libra’s rainforests. Then the murders begin. Someone or something is picking off the team one by one. Angela insists it’s the alien, but her new colleagues aren’t so sure. Maybe she did see an alien, or maybe she has other reasons for being on St Libra ... This is a stunning standalone adventure, by a writer at the height of his powers.

The novel is due in the UK on 27 September 2012 and in the USA on 26 December.

Manhattan in Reverse by Peter F. Hamilton

Best-known for his immense doorstoppers, Peter F. Hamilton is also an experienced writer of SF short stories. Manhattan in Reverse is his second collection of short fiction, collecting together seven stories published over the last eleven years. Unlike his first collection, A Second Chance at Eden, where the stories were all set in the same universe, this time around the fiction is not linked by any theme or setting.


First up is Watching Trees Grow, previously a stand-alone novella published by PS Publishing. The novella is a riff on one of Hamilton's favourite subgenres, the SF mystery thriller, this time set in an alternate history where the pace of technological development was much faster than in real life and there are electric cars on the streets of Oxford in the early 19th Century. A murder takes place and one man becomes obsessed with tracking down the killer...even if it takes centuries. An effective and clever story, riffing on traditional SF tropes about extended lifespans, alternate timelines and technological development.

Footvote is a political satire, in which a politician opens a wormhole to another planet, allowing people to escape from early 21st Century Britain to make a fresh start, but will only allow a narrow definition of people through, resulting in social unrest. One family is torn apart in the resulting chaos. It's an interesting story about escaping responsibility for your actions, but suffers from having some quite dated references already (Gordon Brown as British PM etc). There is a nice line in humour, though, with the constitution for the new planet (which bans traffic wardens from emigrating) apparently designed with Daily Mail readers in mind.

If at First can be seen as a bit of a dry run for a certain storyline in The Evolutionary Void. In this story a police detective finds himself pursuing a criminal and is inadvertently sent back in time to an earlier point in his own timeline. Given the chance to 'start again', he uses his immense knowledge of future events (and future hit pop songs) to build himself a fortune, only to forget his original purpose. It's a funny time travel story with a bleak, but not entirely undeserved, conclusion.

The Forever Kitten feels like Hamilton setting himself an impossible challenge: writing a story in just 1,000 words (or 1/450th the length of The Naked God) for a magazine article. He pulls it off, with a frankly disturbing finale that could bear revisiting in a longer story or novel.

The book is rounded off by three stories set in his Commonwealth setting: Blessed by an Angel is scene-setting stuff for the Void Trilogy, establishing the tensions between the Higher and Advancer cultures and also providing family backstory for a major character from that series. The Demon Trap is the best story in the collection, pitting Paula Myo against an opponent who goes to immense lengths to avoid capture, but who in the end cannot escape responsibility for his actions. Manhattan in Reverse again features Myo, this time investigating an anomalous series of events on a frontier planet flooded with refugees from the Starflyer War. It's effective and entertaining - Myo is rapidly becoming Hamilton's signature character and is one of the better-realised female protagonists of recent SF - but the ending is a little too neat.

Overall, this is an effective and varied collection, with Hamilton revisiting some established themes (longevity, the notion of political responsibility and time travel) and, intriguingly, exploring some ideas that would later come to fruition in the Commonwealth and Void novels. If the collection has a problem, it's that it's way too short: Hamilton has a significant number of pre-2000, non-Confederation short stories that did not appear in A Second Chance at Eden and I was hoping they'd be included here (including - fascinatingly - two collaborations with Graham Joyce and a Greg Mandel novella). Instead we only get seven stories, resulting in a hardcover that is only 260 pages long. Sure, the content is what matters and these seven stories are all at least interesting, but the missing of the opportunity to make the collection more extensive and exhaustive is somewhat frustrating.

But based on what does make it in, Manhattan in Reverse (****) is a solid enough collection of readable, clever and thought-provoking stories from an author who is as comfortable with the short form as he is the half-million-word mega-novel. The collection officially isn't out in the UK until 7 October (though my local bookstore has copies in now) and will be published on 28 February 2012 in the USA (though apparently only as an ebook).