Salvation by Peter F Hamilton
Book One in a new series by the author of the Void Trilogy
Every once in awhile I need a hit of Space Opera and Peter Hamilton usually a pretty good bet. A lot of what he does is the kind of thing that is traceable back to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, with bits of just about everyone else from the canon.
Which is OK. That’s the thing with genre literature, even when novel might be breaking new ground (not that this one does) it still needs to touch base with at least one of that genre’s tropes.
The story stretches from our near future to 2204 by which point mankind has begun to spread out into the galaxy. We are not as alone out there as we think.
Anyway, when I say usually a good bet, I’m struggling a little bit with this one.
First off, let’s get this out of the way right away, there’s too much ‘telling’ instead of ‘showing’. It’s the tricky thing with Sci-Fi. How do you get across to the reader the necessary information about future technologies/societies and the history behind them without the awkwardness of one character telling another something they either would know already or don’t need to know in the first place? I don’t recall noticing that much sinning in this regard in the several of Hamilton’s novels read previously; so I’m not sure why I’m noticing, and being a bit irritated by, a surfeit of it in this one.
The other thing he’s doing here that I’m also noticing, in again a slightly irritable way, is creating a portmanteau like stories within the story set up. Characters are literally saying things along the lines of, ‘let me tell you about the time…’ and then there follows a fifty or so page foray into a noirish police procedural or spy thriller or professional hitman story told in the Third Person.
It isn’t that I’m not enjoying them for what they are, reminiscent of his 2012 novel Great North Road, it’s more that I’m noticing that he’s doing it.
Those caveats aside, I am caught up enough in this one to keep going. If this kind of Science Fiction is your thing you possibly won’t be as bothered about the ‘telling’ business as hypersensitive old me.
If you’re new to Peter F Hamilton I would recommend his Void Trilogy. I would also recommend reading them straight through. If memory serves, he picks right up where the previous one ends with no initial re-capping provided.