Salvation

Absolutely my favourite sci-fi author. That is all.

Best sci-fi I've read in a couple of years. Highly recommend.

An interesting and layered novel that deals with issues of trust, motive and what it means to be human. As the first in a series, many things are left unresolved, and I am looking forward to seeing how the series develops. As an audiobook listener, I was often confused because I couldn’t go back and easily see the different years of each thread or section and how it relates to the current one, but I managed to get the gist of it.

I was looking for a good space opera and so decided to try Peter Hamilton again. In that vein, Salvation is a good read. First in a series, Salvation sets up a future world, a pile of characters, and a bunch of plots to get the whole thing roiling. In it humanity has spread into space, thanks in part to widespread, cheap teleportation doors. Folks can stroll from London to Paris to Mars to an asteroid orbiting another star. There are other innovations and changes, but the doors are the big thing. There are actually several settings. The story's main event occurs during the early 23rd century. There's a historical prelude. And there are chapters taking place in the future's future, some six centuries after an event that isn't specified until the end. The plot - well. It's really a thin frame built on top of a stack of travelers' tales. That's an old, old device, which you can find in Chaucer as well as Dan Simmons. In Salvation we get an odd mix of mostly high-powered folks being driven across an alien world's surface to find an alien starship. Along the way these folks argue, and then explain themselves by narrating a key event in their past. Those stories... are ok. They're mostly crime stories, variations on police procedurals. Hamilton makes them engaging, although I started skimming as I usually do when faced with unremarkable prose, redundant dialog, very few descriptions, and bombastic characters. The details just decreased in interestingness as I plowed on. This experience occupied the majority of my reading time, and had me thinking: hm, three stars. There's also a kind of military training plot taking place in that future's future, where a bunch of kids learn to fight an unnamed bad alien species. This felt like young adult stuff and wasn't that interesting, even after you realize the Chaucerian/Hyperion storytellers are characters from the YA culture's past. Then by the end the opening frame story returned, and Hamilton did great work in completing it, integrating the previous tales while adding some adrenaline kicks and revealing new plots. Obviously it sets up a sequel (again, cf Hyperion) but I knew that going in. I don't want to spoil readers starting off, or in mid-stream, so behind spoiler shields I go: (view spoiler)[I was delighted when our frame plot's narrator took an ax to the head in mid-spiel. A fine coup de theatre! Also, given his name - Kayne - i.e., Cain - I thought he'd be doing the killings. Good. This upended things, giving us the benign aliens as evil invaders, then pulling together threads from the Canterbury tales. Now I was engaged and want to see what's next. (hide spoiler)] One of the pleasures in space opera is the exploration of ideas on a grand background. Another pleasure is seeing old ideas reworked. Salvation is mostly the latter, with teleportation doors, augmented humans, difficult aliens, interstellar commerce, augmented reality devices, etc. being quite familiar. I did find two ideas of note, though, that intrigued me. 1) Using teleportation doors to get rid of junk, including ridding the Earth of industrial-era remains. And naturally the complexities around this. (I think at least one is an open question in the novel, aimed at the next books.) 2) Combining a socialist, post-scarcity utopia with mandatory gender fluidity. The badly named Utopialists insist that each member be modified to occupy an ambiguous space along the gender binary. I've read stories where such modifications were optional and set in a postcapitalist milieu, like Samuel Delany's Trouble on Triton (1976) or Banks' Culture series, but couldn't think of one where they were essential in that setting. This isn't presented as utopian or dystopian; instead, the idea and practice are both celebrated and contested. What else... there are a few little nods to other space opera stories and writers. An offhand remark mentions one star has been nicknamed "the Eye of God"(276), a clear tip of the hat to The Mote in God's Eye (1974) (still one of my favorite sf novels). Three starships are named the Morgan, the McAuley, and the Asher (483, 539), clearly nodding to Richard Morgan, Paul McAuley, and Neal Asher. So, if you're looking for a fun space opera, or a gripping science fiction novel, I recommend it... with the reservations about the storytelling majority of it. PS: here is an official soundtrack for the novel. It's lovely, but not really appropriate. It's dreamy and spacey. In my view it needs to be more energetic and propulsive to address the middle of the novel.