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Salvation Is a Twisty Space Opera Thriller
Among space opera aficionados, Peter F. Hamilton is best known for the Commonwealth novels, a centuries-spanning sci-fi saga pitting utopian human societies against godlike aliens, with all the cool ships and weird tech one could ask for.
So when his new novel Salvation started out as more of a thriller, following the universe’s best troubleshooters on a mission to investigate a piece of alien tech found on a distant world, it felt a little like Hamilton-lite. But only for a little while. While Salvation may fall more on the noir side of the author’s bibliography (not unlike 2012’s unrelated Great North Road, a sci-fi serial killer tale), it is by no means any smaller, with ambitious structure interweaving plots of betrayal and backstabbing, as the malleability of history unfolds into full-scale interstellar war. In fact, the tighter focus on its characters’ hidden motives creates a tighter, more cerebral experience than his more sprawling works, bringing the humans caught up in galactic events to the fore in an intriguing kickoff to what promises to be another fantastic trilogy.
In the far future, a global network of portals known as Connexion has revolutionized civilization, making possible everything from renewable energy, to infinite waste disposal, to the ability to travel to the furthest reaches of the known universe in moments. With these leaps and bounds in technology also came trade with the Olyix, a race of hyper-religious aliens, allowing a new era of transhuman development and extended lifespans. When an incredibly old artifact from an unknown alien race is located on the barren planet of Nkya, Connexion’s head of security dispatches five of the brightest minds humanity has to offer to go study it. But when you’ve lived in the universe as long as Connexion’s team has, you’re bound to have made friends and enemies alike, and the five troubleshooters all have their own agendas.
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Meanwhile, in a separate storyline set much later, a race of uplifted humans prepare for a war with “the enemy” while recounting the tales of the “Five Saints,” who bear a striking resemblance to Connexion’s team. The parallel plots unfold alongside one another, and as the troubleshooters reach their goal and the uplifted prepare for war, details are revealed about the five saints, their pasts, and the future humans’ shadowy enemy, and the fallout from these events will be felt across the stars.
In a word, Salvation is best described as “intense.” On a ground level, it’s concerned with the relationships, connections, and rivalries that develop between the principle players. The theme grounds both storylines—in the far-future setting, the government even tries to weaponize the human tendency to form bonds with living things as an avenue to defeat their shadowy alien enemy.
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The focus on character also makes for a tenser, tighter plot, with individual episodes in each timeframe serving as both standalone action set-pieces and avenues for filling in the backstory, from a dangerous mission to track down black-market body dealers, to a series of unusual animal attacks that hint at how humans have harnessed biotech. A certain sense of foreboding develops, as each subplot adds more detail to our understanding of these futures, and hints at how and why everything goes wrong in the wake of the discovery on Nkya. The two stories both spring from that strange artifact found on a desolate world, and its importance to the universe at large. As MacGuffins go, it’s a good one.
While a bit softer and subtler than the author’s explosive earlier works, Salvation delivers a galaxy-spanning epic worthy of the best space opera, with enough hairpin twists and shocking upsets to keep even veteran genre readers on their toes. Hamilton fans will be wholly satisfied, and new readers will find a welcoming point to explore with him an entirely new universe.