SALVATION

Strange Cargo

Peter F Hamilton is back, with a brand new sequence up his sleeve.

As the career of the late, great James Brown proves, there’s nothing wrong with getting in a groove. But there’s also a danger if that groove becomes too much of a crowd pleaser that it defines what you do until, suddenly, everyone decides that they want something new. SFX has in recent years made much of Peter F Hamilton being the absolute master of big space opera novels, and we wondered if he might see out his career writing big books set in equally huge fictional environs such as his Commonwealth universe.

Yet this notion rather ignores another important strand to Hamilton’s writing career. His first books, the trio of novels that made up the Greg Mandel series, were essentially built around one character, a PI operating in 21st century England. And Misspent Youth – a flawed novel, yet key to understanding Hamilton’s career – which dealt with rejuvenation tech and, indirectly, the effects of the web on society, was another character-driven novel with a narrower focus.

So what kind of science fiction novel might Peter F Hamilton write if he were to combine these two approaches? Salvation may just be the answer, in that it’s a novel with a big backstory, the opening of a new sequence, yet also a book largely focused on the discovery of an alien shipwreck on a distant planet. The problem is less the existence of the ship itself, more – without giving away spoilers – what’s found aboard.

For 23rd century humanity, expanding into the stars via portals that allow instantaneous transfers to distant locations, this comes as a nasty shock. Feriton Kayne, the deputy director of Connexion Exosolar Security Division, sends a team to investigate. But who can be trusted? Each of the team, it soon becomes clear, is the kind of person who becomes an expert in doing dangerous things at a personal cost. These aren’t straightforward people. Oh, and one of their number may be an alien agent…

There are other strands to the book – humanity’s contact with an alien race, the Oliyx (can they be trusted?), and passages set on a world where humans are fighting for their survival – but the heart of the novel lies in the claustrophobic idea of protagonists who can’t entirely trust one another being stuck in each other’s company.

As such – and as Hamilton himself acknowledged when he met up with SFX recently – the book’s structure has parallels with Dan Simmons’s Hyperion. Yet Salvation never seems derivative. For a start, it works brilliantly as a thriller, with Hamilton ratcheting up the tension as we learn about each of the characters.

Importantly, the focus on character here doesn’t come at the expense of world building. Rather, Hamilton uses his characters’ stories to show us key elements of his future society so that, for example, via rescue expert Callum Hepburn, we learn how it deals with miscreants and political agitators. Whereas a few years back Hamilton might have taken us more quickly to the centre of power, here the emphasis is on telling details.

But then perhaps it was always thus. To return to that dichotomy between Hamilton the big space opera guy and the man writing character-driven fiction: we have of course exaggerated for effect. Another way to look at Hamilton’s career is to say that he’s always offered up ambitious, characterdriven narratives, it’s just that he’s been getting progressively better at plotting and sketching people as he’s gone along. Seen from this angle, Salvation is both a culmination of his work to date and a signpost for where it’s going. It’s also exciting, wildly imaginative and quite possibly Hamilton’s best book to date. Jonathan Wright

Hamilton will be signing at Forbidden Planet, London, on 4 September. For more tour dates, visit http://bit.ly/petertour.

Hamilton rachets up the tension brilliantly