Salvation

It is the year 2204, and this is a great future to be alive in, thanks to the harnessing of the quantum entanglement principle and using a technology of linked “jump gates” that allows humanity to get to anywhere in the galaxy and potentially anywhere in the universe. It has led to the development of some incredible alien worlds but also the ability to travel anywhere on Earth with passage through the door. But just as it is a great time to be alive, it is also a dangerous one, with places such as the terrifying prison planet where someone is stuck on a barren world for the rest of their lives.

But everything has changed as a crashed alien spaceship has been discovered 89 light-years away on a distant world. A special team is brought together to investigate this ship and try to determine what is going on without panicking the rest of the world. On their journey to the ship, we get the back-story of each of the characters, in the style of The Canterbury Tales. Meanwhile the story jumps to a place presumably forward in time every once in a while as some new characters are being trained for ultimate survival and the ultimate mission while they pray to saints that bear the same names as the characters investigating the alien spaceship in our current timeline.

Hamilton does what he does best in Salvation, the first book in a new trilogy, creating a complex world and some daring story lines that leave the reader wanting more. The one failing of the book is that it bears some strong similarities to Dan Simmons’s award winning Hyperion, which features “farcasters” that allow anyone to travel anywhere, as well as a Canterbury Tales-style telling of the characters’ back stories. It will be interesting to see where the next book in the trilogy takes the reader.