Peter F. Hamilton is one of those authors who writes a very clear “brand” of fiction. He’s mixed in some experiments over the years, like a children’s fantasy series and an audiobook-exclusive trilogy, but usually Hamilton writes very long, multi-viewpoint space opera. He came to prominence with the Night’s Dawn trilogy, beginning with The Reality Dysfunction (1996). Later, Pandora’s Star (2004) and Salvation (2018) each launched series in which he executed his style of fiction with increasing success.
Hamilton novels feature plots that deliver some pulpy thrills, like gun fights and space battles, but also have lengthy stretches between action scenes which immerse the reader in the mechanics of how Hamilton imagines a future spacefaring civilization might function. For readers patient enough with the slow pace, the length of his stories provides a lot of room for plot twists and worldbuilding depth.
Exodus: The Archimedes Engine (2024) is Hamilton’s latest novel. As a very long, multi-viewpoint space opera, and the first installment of a two-book series, it’s very much on-brand for Hamilton. The twist this time is that it’s a novel set in the same world as a forthcoming video game called Exodus. Tie-in novels have a bad reputation, one that has mostly been well-earned. Whether "expanded universe" extensions to popular properties or novelizations of films or games, tie-in projects often shackle writers with tight deadlines and content constraints. Quality can be less of a priority when the publisher is confident they can sell to an existing fanbase.
This project is a little different from the typical pattern. Exodus, the game, is a new property from a new studio. It’s been in development for years and still has no release date. There isn’t really an existing fanbase. Apparently, the process here looked something like Hamilton being given the worldbuilding notes by the writers working on the game, and then expanding it with his own ideas while he wrote the novel. Some of his ideas might in turn make it back into the game. Most importantly, Hamilton’s novel only shares its setting with the game. The book tells its own story with its own characters. If you’re really looking carefully, and I was, there are a few paragraphs amid the hundreds of pages where you can spot a detail or two and say, “Yeah, that’s set up for the way the game will work,” but it doesn’t detract at all from the experience.
The novel is set in the very far future in “the Centauri cluster,” a large group of star systems 16,000 light years from Earth. There are no aliens in this setting, so the only inhabitants are colonists who traveled in slower-than-light sleeper ships that all left Earth at roughly the same time. These ships went in all different directions, but the ships that arrived in the Centauri cluster sent out a signal that there were lots of “green worlds” ready for colonization. Apparently, this part of the galaxy is indeed uniquely good for humans, because eventually most of the other colony ships changed course and headed to the Centauri cluster. But since the signal had to cross thousands of light-years to reach the other ships, and because the ships themselves moved slower than light, this whole process took a very long time.
Relativity caused a peculiar stratification in the resulting civilization. The ships that arrived earlier end up spending thousands of years fighting each other, advancing their technology, and genetically engineering themselves to the point that they are literally different species from humans and from each other. The most advanced of these, a species called Elohim, end up with technology truly indistinguishable from magic, building miraculous megastructures but eventually withdrawing from view. Those left behind, collectively called “Celestials,” carve out rival interstellar empires for themselves. They have advanced tech and can use the Elohims’ technology, but they don’t really understand it. Eventually, more colony ships arrive bearing unmodified humans, people almost exactly like us, but these unlucky late arrivals are turned away by most Celestials and struggle to find a place for themselves.
All this gets explained as the story progresses, but someone didn’t trust the reader to piece it all together, so instead it’s described in what amounts to a five page encyclopedia entry before the narrative begins. Even from the brief summary above, it should be clear that, while the details are clever and as far as I know unique, the upshot of it all is that we end up in very standard science fiction territory. The mysterious, godlike, but mostly absent Elohim are the forerunners, the vanished elder race. The colorfully weird Celestials are the people-in-makeup aliens of Star Trek, though here they are all more advanced and powerful than humans. And the regular humans are a tiny minority, clinging to a desperate existence as an impoverished class of refugees.
The most unique feature of the setting is the Gates of Heaven. Created by the mysterious Elohim, these megastructures allow Celestial spaceships to accelerate almost instantly to near light speed, canceling inertia as they do so to ensure that this incredible acceleration happens without crushing the ships and everything inside them. I said this was unique, but many gamers will immediately recognize this as sounding extremely similar to the “mass relays” from the very successful Mass Effect games. Drew Karpyshyn, the lead writer of Mass Effect (2007) and Mass Effect 2 (2010), is the lead writer for the game Exodus, but there’s a difference here. In Exodus, these Gates of Heaven don’t enable instantaneous FTL travel like in Mass Effect, they just accelerate ships to near light speed. This means that if you are on one of these spaceships, the trip between star systems only takes a few days, but for the friends and family you left behind, your trip will take years or decades (depending on how many light years away your destination was).
This all is from the game and its writers. Hamilton seems to have been given a free hand to build his own “alien” race, the vaguely humanoid—but marsupial—Imperial Celestials, who can transfer their consciousness to a younger body and so achieve a kind of immortality. Beyond this culture, Hamilton’s worldbuilding mostly consists of gadgets. Along with a starter pack of science fiction tropes like flying cars, space elevators, and big spaceships, there are about a half dozen gadgets people in this future have that we don’t have. These include “livestone,” a material that can grow and change in response to commands, allowing buildings to be grown through a gardening process instead of construction.
Hamilton is adept at playing around with the pieces unique to his setting and getting a lot of mileage out of them: The sociology of human/Celestial relations is likewise a reasonable extrapolation based on this universe’s timeline of future history while still having a lot of resonance with the present day. Some readers might consider it a little too much resonance, however. Beyond the book’s special gadgets and the standard sci-fi set dressing, the rest of people’s lives is extremely familiar. Police read criminals their rights in almost exactly the same way that American police recite Miranda rights, there’s lots of discussion of “gangs” who act like drug cartels, drug use is one of the biggest social ills afflicting humanity, and people are worried that valuable manufacturing jobs are going to be lost due to changes in interstellar trade.
Because this human society might not be that distant in subjective time from our own, Hamilton could have made a more daring choice and had police actually reading Miranda rights, people overdosing on fentanyl instead of invented drugs, and so on. Instead, he plays it safe. The drugs are different drugs and whatever the source of the people’s rights (I don’t think it’s made clear) it’s not the US Constitution. Still, the familiarity means the story is a lot more accessible than a more thoroughly re-envisioned future might be, such as the settings of Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief (2010) or Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth (2019). That accessibility is probably important for a video game property, but veteran genre readers might find the amount of speculation here a bit thin given the length of the book.
The story follows two main threads. One is centered on Finn, a young man from a human family that has grown wealthy and powerful by collaborating with their oppressive Celestial overlords. Finn longs for the freedom to travel in space, and—in what seems like a stroke of luck—he encounters a newly arrived colony ship and eagerly becomes its captain, in exchange for settling most of the colonists on his family estate. In the story’s other thread, a human police officer named Terence is recruited by a shadowy Celestial security agency to try to unravel a complex criminal conspiracy. There’s also a comparatively minor third thread that follows Thyra, a low-ranking Celestial princess, as she maneuvers for the honor of being chosen as the Queen’s new host. If she succeeds, her mind will be the latest to be overwritten by the Queen’s consciousness, which has been jumping from body to body for millennia.
Despite a massive cast and a very slow-paced narrative, only two characters get explored in real depth: Finn and Terence. In theory, this could make for an interesting contrast. Finn is a thrill-seeking child of privilege whose boredom with the stasis of his society leads him to run away and first live the life of a criminal and then become a starship captain. The first choice is a rejection of his family and the second is necessarily a complete temporal break with them. Terence, meanwhile, comes from a little more of a middle-class background, and he’s a family man who mostly stays on the same planet. He feels an obligation to protect the lives of ordinary people, even if that means he has to collaborate with and even defend an oppressive regime.
Finn gets the most time, especially early in the novel, and he is often quite insufferable. He’s spoiled, naïve, and never more than vaguely aware of the impacts his choices have on anyone but himself. I think this is an intentional characterization on Hamilton’s part, but the story leaves it up to the reader to decide what they think of Finn. It’s an advantage of very long stories like this that they can show a character slowly changing, but for this book at least the reader must watch over Finn’s shoulder for hundreds and hundreds of pages and dozens of dumb choices.
Finn’s love interest, Ellie, ought to be a counterbalance. She’s fresh off a colony ship and is thus almost a woman of our own time, so she’s a natural audience surrogate. But, as is often the case with love interests, she never becomes more than an accessory to Finn’s story. The book allows her to criticize Finn, voicing complaints about him that the reader will likely agree with, but the pages pass in their hundreds without ever showing why she’s tagging along as Finn’s sidekick. It’s certainly possible for an apparently sensible woman like Ellie to be attracted to someone like Finn, but the book never quite pays enough attention to her to show us what the relationship means to her.
In the book’s most bewildering character moment, Ellie is left behind by Finn while he goes on a dangerous commando mission. She vigorously protests this because she wants to be treated as an equal by Finn—even though he has a lot of combat experience and she doesn’t have any. Then, when the mission goes wrong, Ellie saves the day. She’s able to do this because she was left behind in safe place where she can think up a plan to salvage the situation. Afterward, everyone agrees the lesson to learn is that Finn was wrong to leave Ellie behind and he promises to always let her come with him in the future. I get that shooting at people and getting shot at is part of being an important character in a story like this, but “female character with agency” doesn’t just mean “allowed to participate in gunfights.” Ellie gets to shoot guns for the rest of the book, but it would be better if she got to make an active and understandable choice to keep following Finn around despite his dumb decisions.
Perhaps Ellie will get a better chance to shine in the second book. Finn does finally show a little bit of character growth by the end, but the questions that Finn and Terence’s characters seem set up to explore aren’t resolved. Should young men like Finn forgo violence or just try harder to channel their violence to idealistic, revolutionary ends? Is Terence just as naïve as Finn when he works with the corrupt establishment against “terrorist” enemies of the regime, or is he right to try to enforce the law and protect innocent people? These themes await further development.
Nevertheless, the actual plot comes to a very tidy and satisfying conclusion by the end of the book. The three different story threads converge in an impactful climax. There’s a bit of setup for the sequel, but almost all the important mysteries are resolved and so are the fates of many of the side characters. Hamilton’s ability to weave such a complex narrative at a steady (albeit slow) pace, and then tie everything up at the end, makes for a real accomplishment, one that eludes a lot of authors writing novels that are much shorter and less complicated.
Readers who enjoyed Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth and Salvation series and are interested in more of his signature type of science fiction will get exactly that from Exodus: The Archimedes Engine. They can rest assured he’s not much encumbered by sharing the setting with the video game, though so far this new series hasn’t quite risen to the heights of those that came before. Anyone new to Hamilton but interested in a widescreen space opera epic, however, is still better off starting with Pandora’s Star.
[Editor's Note: Publication of this review was made possible by a gift from Kate Clancy during our annual Kickstarter.]