Peter’s novels might well be the fiction of big ideas, but it’s how those concepts are filtered through the lens of individuals which really brings them into focus. It’s sort of a precursor to the Commonwealth Saga proper, Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained, which move the action three centuries on into a universe where humanity has all but eradicated death. In a very prescient fashion, Misspent Youth grapples with the theme of a future Britain’s role in Europe. Many readers will perhaps be most familiar with Peter’s Commonwealth novels, which began with 2002’s Misspent Youth.
He’s the master of the series, his first being the Greg Mandel trilogy, which began in 1993 with Mindstar Rising, and introduced the titular character, a former soldier turned private detective.Īfter that, Peter broadened his scope – and his page count – with his first real foray into space opera with what became known as the Night’s Dawn trilogy, each one more than a thousand pages and racking up some 1.2 million words. The Saints of Salvation is Peter’s twenty-second novel, including his YA fantasy trilogy known as The Queen of Dreams, as well as two volumes of short fiction. Hamilton series, things never go well for too long. The Earth they find is a veritable utopia where lifespans have been extended almost indefinitely. The overarching conceit is that a huge interstellar ark filled with aliens en route to the outer limits of the universe have arrived in our solar system.
Take his latest series, The Salvation Sequence, the third volume of which, The Saints of Salvation, is out now.
The term “high concept” could have been coined to describe the universe-spanning cognitions that Peter crams into every book. We’re not just talking big in relation to physical heft, though some of Peter’s novels do clock in at over the thousand page mark, but also in the size of the ideas contained therein. If you like big books then you really should have a – structurally sound – shelf devoted to the works of arguably Britain’s brightest science fiction star: Peter F.
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