(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
There is an enormous luxury and sense of expansive indulgence that comes with settling into a sci-fi epic that stretches for almost 900 pages.
That sense of narrative pleasure only grows greater still when the author who has penned this magnificent space operatic masterpiece is Peter F. Hamilton, a master of the genre who first came to this reviewer’s attention way back in 2004 when he was working overseas for six weeks and had nothing to fill his long hotel room evenings and weekends but with very long and involving stories.
Hamilton has always had a penchant for massively engrossing stories that sprawl with engaging world-building and fascinating characters but Exodus: The Archimedes Engine #1: Become the Traveler perhaps this predilection even further than before, taking us on a journey that spans a galaxy, great swathes of history and the endless possibility of freedom.
A companion book to a major action-adventure RPG (Role-Playing Game) from Archetype Entertainment, Exodus TAE #1: Become the Traveler is no simple tie-in to an online game.
While this reviewer is no online gamer, and thus is blissfully unaware what the RPG involves, the book goes into extraordinarily lush detail about a far future reality where a series of arkships, fleeing a dying Earth and a solar system in decline, arrive in the Centauri cluster, which is full to the galactic of habitable planets and which fosters an accelerated evolution of these travellers into advanced beings who are now known as Celestials.
‘You know how to deal with her, Majesty. You’ve had thousands of year’s experience.’
‘Indeed I have.’
Over 30,000 years, the Celestials has fashioned themselves into a multitudinous variety of incrdibly long-loved beings – their conscious mind is downloaded into their children who are an amalgam of all their ancestors though with one original personality dominating – who are anywhere between two to three metres tall, and who come with an impressive range of genetic mods and cutting-edge tech that enable them to act and think like gods.
With this kind of advancement, comes an arrogance which treats the rump normal humans, many of whom arrived on subsequent arkships to find the cluster full of Celestials who treat their far distant genetic cousins are little better than animals, forbidding them from owning property and pursuing life on their terms, forever marching to the beat of an oppressive system that allows them little latitude for self determination.
That setting alone speaks to the dizzying complexity and thoughtfulness of Hamilton’s world-building which captivates you from the word go, deftly capturing what it is like for Celestials and humans alike to exist in a system that values stability above all else and which as a result is close to tipping, if it hasn’t already, into a stagnated sense of unadventurous civilisation.
It is against this galaxy-wide fossilisation that a number of groups, human and Celestials alike, have begun to agitate, sometimes openly, other times behind the scenes with impressove cloak and dagger ops enacted over decades, and it is their actions that power the gripping story of Exodus TAE #1: Become the Traveler and propel it from a reasonably relaxed recounting of history and the present day to a rollickig race to a highly disruptive temporary finish line. (“Temporary” because a second, no doubt equally big second volume is in the offing for later this year.)
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
There are a number of key characters at the heart of this story but the one who really captures your attention is Finn, a member of a family of augmented humans who administer the planet of Gondiar on behalf of the Celestials, ensuring that the rich agricultural planet continues to serve its key role as a lynchpin in the steady civilisational hum of the Crown Dominion, one of many such dominions across the Centauri cluster.
Finn has chafed since childhood against the restrictions of his station in life, but his struggle, unlike the human revolutionaries with whom he increasingly comes into contact, is more of a free spirit seeking to escpae the chafing impositions of high office (think Prince Harry leaving the British Royal Family for California).
All he wants to do is wander the galaxy like the Travelers do, collecting powerful remnants of ancestral tech and fighting for humanity’s right to determine its own future as well as lining their own pockets.
So, when an arkship arrives in-system, many, many years after the last of its kind, he seizes the opportunity to realise his dream of escaping Gondiar and to forge a path and an identity that owes nothing to privilege and position and everything to his own can-do ambition.
But the arkship’s arrival sets in chain a host of Dominion-rocking events which threaten to completely rewrite once again what it means to be human and what a world fashioned by them might look like.
Stop talking, Finn pleaded silently. He tried to look away from the cloudscape. Couldn’t.
‘But here you’re actually inside infinity; there’s no ship’s hull protecting you. That makes it ultra-real, puts the universe into perspective in a way looking across space never can. All that emptiness—‘
‘I said I’m fine.’ Finn nodded curtly for emphasis. And promptly threw up.
One of the major pluses of the sprawling length of Exodus TAE #1: Become the Traveler, which Hamilton to full and compelling advantage, is that there is time for both pell-mell straight-ahead action, the kind that sets the heart in motion and keeps the nerves deliciously on end, and quieter more reflective where we have time to get to know characters, the rhythms of Centauri society and how people and convention come together to stoke the fires of seismic change.
So much time is able to be devoted to the nuance and details of the society and the incredible variety of people that inhabit it that when great adrenaline-pumping scenes punctuate the quieter passages they feel fuller and more susbstantial because so many time and effort has into world-building and characterisation.
It’s a fulsomely satisfying completist brew that offers emotional, groundedly human intimacy and blockbuster level action, ensuring that Exodus TAE #1: Become the Traveler is the full deal – a sci-fi epic that goes big and wide and huge while never losing the sense that here are real lives being affected and trajectories of society and citizen changed.
As big and full as the star-filled section of the galaxy in which it is set, Exodus TAE #1: Become the Traveler is a luxuriant masterpiece, a page-turning triumph that takes us deep and wide into the machinations of a society that is technologically rich but feudally inclined when it comes to the exercise of power and government, and which, while it values stability above all else, is heading for a seismic reckoning that all but ensures nothing will ever be the same again.