Salvation Is a Twisty Space Opera Thriller

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.

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.

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.