Review: Salvation by Peter F Hamilton

In the nearish future, humanity is living prosperously with the development of portal technology that allows people to zip easily around the world or off the planet. Medicine too has advanced thanks to extraordinary treatments courtesy of some beneficent aliens who are briefly visiting our solar system in an ark ship destined for the end of the universe. A team of influential but skilled people are brought together for a mysterious investigation into what appears to be a crashed spaceship.

Meanwhile, in the far future, a team of teenagers are being trained to fight a war of survival against an alien threat that is systematically exterminating humanity.

Salvation has several common features with Dan Simmons’s Hyperion. The near future plotline is told in a Canterbury Tales-style — a set of travellers take turns telling a story from their past, with each story revealing more of the wider backstory to the events in the book. The far future plotline adopts a brutal-training-of-young-people plot to train them for a war of existence against an implacable foe.

Like other Hamilton books, the story revolves around an apparently unbeatable enemy bent on humanity’s destruction. There are sympathetic revolutionaries, corporate security bad-asses, dubious ethics and prolonged action sequences. The whole adds up to something that feels familiar without directly resembling any one book in particular. Unlike Hyperion‘s structure, each of the traveller’s tales is similar in style (near future techno-thrillers with a minor mystery in each which is tangential to the broader mystery of the crashed spaceship they are travelling towards). I found the near-future characters tended to blur into similarity, with insufficient difference between the styles of story they related and their roles within it. The arc of the far-future story felt too obvious in its overall direction but at least the characters felt more distinct.

It’s is still entertaining, Hamilton knows how to keeps a story moving and to tease a mystery but it is a very conservative experiment in structure for Hamilton. He’s been writing complex multi-character narratives for sometime but paradoxically this one felt less varied in its multiple-prespectives than usual.

Entertaining but no surprises. Book one of a series.