Book name: Salvation
Author: Peter F Hamilton
Publisher: Macmillan
Format: Print, ebook, audiobook
Genre: Science fiction
Publication Date: 2018
Star Rating: 5/5
There’s a bit of everything to Salvation by Peter F Hamilton.
Really, Salvation is a science-fiction novel. It’s moderately hard science fiction, in my opinion.
But it also has, at times, the feel of a futuristic cop drama and also the feel of a futuristic corporate security story.
How so?
Well, these changes in tone and content are partly in play because Salvation moves from a near future (2204), to backstories such as the one in 2092 and also to a future that is clearly entirely different, which has a different system of recording years.
When Salvation begins, four aliens have secretly arrived on Earth intending to insert themselves into the human population.
We don’t know who they are, so any of the subsequent point-of-view characters could be one of them…
Security Director Feriton Kayne is tasked with investigating a spaceship that has been found on a newly discovered planet.
He puts together his team and they set off. Along the way, much of the existing backstory for these main characters is told via flashback stories.
For instance, we learn how Connexion’s boss investigated when his granddaughter’s boyfriend Horatio was snatched.
The suggestion was that Horatio was being harvested as a body to host someone else’s brain. But we aren’t sure.
Perhaps Horatio was being snatched by those aliens who arrived at the beginning…
Feriton’s interest in the spaceship found on the newly discovered planet grows when he learns that human bodies have been found onboard.
Who were they? How did the aliens take them? And where are they going to?
Some of the flashback stories, in times not so far from 2023, felt quite familiar. There was still a science-fiction element, and the futuristic world building was quite vivid. Most of all, I loved the way that these stories informed the ‘current’ narrative time of 2204, as Feriton found his way across space to the planet with its downed spaceship.
Salvation is the first in a series, so don’t expect all its questions to be answered in this one book.
Think of it more as setting out on a journey to find out more about an amazing fictional universe, where the underlying mystery of where those aliens masquerading as humans is central to a lengthy narrative.
I loved Peter F Hamilton’s writing style. There was plenty of narrative drive. The mini back stories all concluded promptly, so I always felt as if the story moved along quickly within the bigger narrative.
There was plenty of investigative detail and, for me, the most interesting part of the story was how Feriton and his team conducted their missions. Lots of tech, lots of surveillance details and lots of futuristic feel.
An excellent story. Highly recommended.
Thank you for reading my review.
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