r/PeterFHamilton

I don't know how far this will come across and I don't know what others think is well, but I just finished Salvation. The first Peter Hamilton book I've read.

So when I first read it and was getting into the story itself, I was hooked on the main plot line where a team is made to explore an unknown space craft, and on the team are people who have shared experiences with the event prior to happen. The strongest character arc I believe is Yuri's, for me it connects much stronger to what they discovered on this new ship, with cloning, brain transplants and body enhancements. Even though I did find Yuri to be edgy throughout the book, but his character arc was pretty strong.

But unfortunately that excitement, did go down hill as when I got to the second half of the book where I lost interest, and by the end I concluded the book to be disappointing, where I found the plot not lining up, arcs that didn't go anywhere and a very rushed ending that's left on a to be continued. I won't go into detail on what I didn't like, because this post would be very long. If anyone asks what I didn't like about it, I would reply with a bit more detail. Not a terrible book, but not great either. First opinions of Peter F Hamilton, even though it is very hard to ignore the disappointment when reading Salvation, I don't want to be very negative at the same time, because I do like some of the things he wrote in salvation and I want to read more of his work and see how he uses hard Sci Fi in other books, so this isn't going to be a review where I'm just shitting on Peter F Hamilton when I've only read one book and there's multiple books he's written that could be better than salvation. So if anyone has any recommendations on what to read next of Peter F Hamilton, feel free to give some out in the comments and I'll look into reading them next. But for my last question, with everything I didn't like about the book, such as the pointless story arcs, rushed ending, plot line not adding up, do i expect that with other books from Peter F Hamilton?

As I continue my current reread of PFH’s entire bibliography I wanted to point out one book where he strays from the norm. In just about everything he’s written PFH has a character who is some combination of ultra wealthy, a ruthless capitalist, an outgoing entrepreneur, cavalier, dislikes (or at least sees it as inferior than themself) the government, and this person usually plays a large role in saving humanity when governments have failed. Nigel Sheldon, Gore Burnelli, Ainsley Zangari, Joshua Calvert, Ione, etc.

The one exception is Great North Road. In this story the only person who truly understood what humanity faced and actually could solve the problem was the Marxist living on a commune habitat who has rejected his brothers capitalist outlook because it holds back true human growth. Sure he is only able to start it all up because he inherited/helped build the largest company ever but PFH goes out of his way to show that it is his economic and social system that gives humanity the tools it needs. It’s just a neat outlier.

The other thing is just silly. As I went through Salvation I was imagining what Ainsley Zangari would be in the world we inhabit and it’s just horrible to think about lol. Imagine if Jeff Bezos was going around every day saying that Mexicans are shifty bastards who are secretly out to destroy us. He makes this well known to the point that even other racists look at him funny. He’s so paranoid that he begins secretly building nukes to use against Mexico. Then at some point it turns out he is right and every Mexican immigrant is actually an enemy agent who has been plant bombs/spyware in all American construction projects.

Laying it out in real world terms really makes you understand why everyone thought he was a nutter until shit hit the fan lol.

I don’t want to be a drum that’s already been beat so I apologize in advance if this has been asked before, but, is there like a picture cheat sheet somewhere with the factions in this series? I’m on The Temporal Void and I’m starting to get lost. 😢

"Deep inside the watermoon, two hundred tons of mass converted into raw energy in under a second. The massive globe of water absorbed it, transforming to hyper-energized vapor – a waternova expanding outward at high velocity, loosing density as it went until it reduced to a rolling plasma sphere seventy thousand kilometers in diameter. For the first few minutes, its intensity overwhelmed that of the star. The radiation that the waternova mass had initially absorbed began to dissipate, bombarding the adjoining moons. Their membranes withered and broke, leaving the surface to boil away in cataracts of coronal-sized arches of steam.

From the omniscient viewpoint of the framework, the waternova’s corona began to fade down into mere sensor-burning violet – a process that would take weeks to complete. Meanwhile the otherwise uniform sphere of light was beset with internal sparkles as the hexagonal prisms of mass rivers caught inside the blast front dissolved away and their own component atoms fluoresced violently. There was one slim flare of dazzling light racing ahead of the insubstantial wavefront, its already dangerous velocity accelerating at ten gees. When it reached half a million kilometers away from the waternova’s periphery, the drive switched off.

A quiescent Arcadia’s Moon shot through the center of the framework grid and raced on outward."