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.