The Archimedes Engine

Tie-in fiction! We know it, we love it. Some of us love it, anyway. I’ve dipped my toes into the niche before and found it to be a mostly pleasant, if forgettable, experience.

But those books were all connected to already-established IPs. How about tie-in fiction for something that isn’t even out yet?

Exodus is a sci-fi roleplaying/action game set to release next year, billed as a spiritual successor to the venerable Mass Effect series whose fifth entry is still an unknown number of years away (and which, for reasons I won’t bother going into, people generally don’t have very high hopes for). As part of the lead-up to the game’s release, seasoned British SF author Peter F. Hamilton is putting out a duology of books set in the game’s universe. I am completely unfamiliar with the man’s work, but apparently he’s got a solid reputation.

The Archimedes Engine (or Exodus: The Archimedes Engine: Become The Traveler, to give it it’s full unwieldy title) is built on the same Dune template as The Sun Eater, in that it’s set tens of thousands of years in the future after humanity has spread throughout the stars and adopted Space Feudalism. Unlike The Sun Eater, this is not a rip-off of Dune’s setting by any means. In fact, it has some intriguing twists on the formula.

In the novel’s backstory, fleets of human pioneers set out from a dying Earth in all directions to find new homes for humanity. One group of these arkships discovered a dense concentration of habitable systems in the Centauri Cluster and dutifully sent out a signal to call the rest of the fleets. Unfortunately, faster than light travel had not been achieved, which means that by the time the fleets turned away from their initial trajectories and made it to the Cluster, a lot of time had passed.

Thousands of years of time, at least to the universe outside the ships where relativistic time dilation wasn’t a factor. In those thousands of years, the initial population of Centauri settlers discovered the joys of transhumanism, transformed themselves into a wild array of biologically diverse “Celestials”, and began carving up the Centauri Cluster into warring empires. Thus, by the time the other fleets arrived, they found not the thousands of empty inhabitable worlds they had been promised, but a late-game Stellaris map where all of the alien species were modified humans…and the Celestials viewed these basic bitch newcomers as, at best, pitifully unevolved throwbacks, at worst active security threats. Granted settlement rights on a handful of worlds by the more tolerant Celestials, the humans of the Centauri Cluster aren’t quite second-class citizens, but also aren’t that far from being second class citizens.

The action of the story takes place in one particular Celestial Dominion ruled by five powerful queens, and specifically the capital system of that dominion, which hosts multiple planets where humans are allowed to live. Our protagonist is Finn Jalgori-Tobu, scion of the ruling nobility of one of these planets, born with biotech abilities beyond the means of ordinary humanity due to his distant half-Celestial ancestry. Finn is doing the same “bored noble who dreams of Adventure among the stars” thing that Kvothe Atreides was, and he’s just as shit at it, so the book opens with him almost getting killed by mercenaries. He’s rescued by Ellie and Josias, settlers from an arkship that was heading directly away from the Centauri Cluster when the Green Worlds signal came, and who have consequently only just arrived after more than forty thousand years. Realising that they can make a mutually-beneficial trade—his ancestral lands for their ship—Finn becomes entangled in the settlers’ plight and subsequently has many of his core beliefs shaken when it turns out they’re not inclined to take the status quo of life in the Crown Dominion at face value.

At the same time, larger events are conspiring to shake up that status quo. The powerful Elohim, who are as far beyond the other Celestials as the Celestials are beyond humans, have sent a fabulously valuable iron gas giant hurtling towards the heart of the Crown Dominion (via the titular Archimedes Engine, which they use to move planets around like billiard balls). Its arrival has the potential to disrupt the current steady state wherein the five queendoms just barely agree to work together, and it will also seriously affect the status of humans in the Dominion, who are tolerated mostly for their ability to mine iron on high-gravity, ore-rich worlds that the wispy Celestials find uncomfortable.

…That was a lot more detail than I usually go into in these reviews, but it was necessary because I’m going to be discussing the story’s setting a lot here. As you would expect from a book that mainly exists to communicate the backstory and lore of a video game franchise, it’s a big focus.

That setting does have a lot of interesting features, but before I get to them, I have to ask: what’s with the Space Feudalism? I’m getting as sick of that shit as I am of Space Rome. The idea that humanity’s future civilization among the stars will be autocratic is depressingly plausible, but why would we revert to an existing autocratic government system, rather than inventing a brand new one to suit the material conditions of interstellar existence? In the timeline of Exodus’ setting, medieval Europe was as far in the initial Celestials’ past as the stone age is in ours. With 20,000 years of history in space to draw on, what made them decide to base their governance, culture, and aesthetics on this one slice of history that took place on one continent of a home planet that’s been an irrelevant ball of dust for longer than humans had an organised civilization on it?

Okay, anyway, just had to get that off my chest. The setting does have a lot of positives as well.

I’m usually not a big fan of space opera stories that take place across a whole galaxy of planets, because I find that ballooning the setting out to such a vast scale paradoxically makes it feel smaller rather than bigger. When there are thousands of inhabited planets, anything happening on one of them feels irrelevant. Something like Star Trek avoids this by anchoring the story to a single location—a starship—but most space opera doesn’t confine itself similarly.

By contrast, even though the story of The Archimedes Engine strays outside of the bounds of the Crown Dominion, the story is heavily focused on the politics of the Crown Dominion, with the other dominions being distant foreign powers. Even more specifically, it’s focused on just one system within the five that make up the dominion, and about three quarters of that attention is further narrowed to a single human-inhabited planet. All of this means that the book’s setting feels a lot deeper and richer than many similar stories tend to.

I also like that the condition of humans within the Crown Dominion is nuanced, at least for most of the book. It would have been very easy to have the Celestials as out and out tyrants and the humans being plucky rebels fighting back against an obviously oppressive force. Instead, the situation reminded me a lot more of… well, to step directly onto a particularly high-voltage third rail, it kind of reminded me of the Israel/Palestine situation, in that the on-paper legal status of humans within the dominion doesn’t seem to be that much lower than Celestials, but the practical reality of the situation is that the Celestials have the humans by the throat and can brutalize them with impunity any time they want, without meaningful consequences. Part of the process of awakening that Finn and the other humans go through—and something that the new arrivals from Earth spot right away—is that this is a bad thing regardless of whether the Celestials choose to exercise that ability.

The Celestials of the Crown Dominion are interesting too, given that their big transhuman innovation is a “mindline” capability that lets them transfer their consciousness to a new host body, effectively achieving immortality. This has a lot of subtle, but profound, effects on how they view memory, identity and personhood. For example, the Celestials always have multiple children per spawning (via a marsupial-esque process where the father incubates the foetus in a chest pouch, incidentally), one of whom will be chosen to host the parent’s mindline when the time comes. Until that choice is made, all of them are seen as “aspects” of their parent rather than fully separate individuals in their own right, and they receive regular downloads of memories and personality traits in order to stop their mental development from diverging too much from the parents’. Whether or not the host personality actually integrates with their parent’s mindline or is just replaced by it is a horrifying thought experiment which is left up to the reader to conduct.

I like when aliens are properly alien, so it’s kind of neat that the “aliens” in this setting really are substantially different from humans, despite actually being evolutionary off-shoots of humans. And keep in mind, the Crown Dominion Celestials are among the less divergent species of Celestial; later in the book we get a glimpse of some truly wacky shit when agents of other dominions get time in the spotlight.

Granted, there are some setting details that are unintentionally silly or which clash with the rest of the book’s tone. For example, there’s a weapon in the book that completely erases the contents of a person’s brain, effectively killing their extant personality and leaving them with the psychology of a newborn. Pretty horrifying.

What is this terrifying weapon called?

A YouBuster.

Because it Busts You, you see.

While the book’s setting might be interesting, it’s undercut by the way it’s presented. When I described the story’s premise—humans from much closer to our present time arriving tens of thousands of years later in an unrecognisable galaxy—you might have pictured an obvious way of onboarding new readers to that world: make the protagonist one of those late arrivals and have the reader discover the setting alongside them.

That’s not what happens here. Instead, the majority of the point of view characters were born and raised in the Crown Dominion, so the book is throwing readers into the setting at the deep end. As previously stated, it’s a pretty involved world, so how do you welcome readers into it if not through the main viewpoint characters? Here are some ways you could do it:

1. A timeline of historical events, including the backstory of the Crown Dominion, at the start of the book

2. A brief prologue explaining just the broad outline of the premise

3. Some expository dialogue between knowledgeable characters to let the reader pick up on the important points

4. A long scene where someone who is familiar with the setting explains it to someone who isn’t

I think any one of those could have helped, without bogging down the story’s pacing.

The Archimedes Engine uses all four of them. There’s a timeline, and then there’s a prologue, and then there’s multiple chapters where people familiar with the lore drop clues for the reader, and then, long after anyone paying attention will have figured all of this shit out, there’s an excruciating bit where Finn re-re-re-explains it all again to Ellie.

This book’s story gets good. Gripping, even. But reaching that point is a bit of a slog, between the issues I talked about above, the glacial pacing, and most of all, the Finn Problem.

There are three main plot threads in the book, split between a few different POVs. By far my favourite is the one about a human detective becoming a Celestial agent to investigate Espionage Crimes, mostly because it’s the only one that’s always moving forward and has a minimal amount of filler. After that is a thread about political machinations among the five queens of the Dominion, which is interesting, but is let down somewhat by the queens being written like high school mean girls (I guess men who engage in cold-blooded backstabbing and power plays retain something approaching dignity, whereas women who do the same are catty bitches motivated by petty jealousy).

Then there’s Finn.

I fucking hate Finn. Copy-paste everything negative I said about Kvothe Atreides and multiply it by ten, and you’re still only halfway to understanding how annoying Finn is. To be fair, unlike with The Sun Eater, this book is definitely aware that Finn is grating—there’s an immensely satisfying bit where Ellie goes ballistic at him for being a whiny little shit—but the thing is, that doesn’t make him any less irritating to read about. You can write about a spoiled rich asshole and still make them interesting, even sympathetic (Jane Austen arguably made a career out of doing this), but this is not that. Finn isn’t interesting or sympathetic, he’s just annoying.

And boring, too. There is nothing more to him beyond being an idle dilettante who generically Yearns for Adventure for no particular reason, and that’s before the (kind of bullshit) late-game plot twist where it turns out the only glimmers of agency he’s shown over the course of the story were implanted into his mind by the villain.

Another problem I had with Finn’s sections is that a lot of them are taken up with overly long action scenes and space dungeon crawls (there’s a bunch of derelict Celestial structures all over the place full of valuable tech guarded by robots, which seems like it was put in specifically for the game; there’s even a bit where Finn’s group has to fight off increasingly-difficult waves of enemies as he downloads something from a terminal). Hamilton can write an engaging and tense action sequence, but his enthusiasm for these parts sometimes runs ahead of his descriptions, making the positioning of the various combatants and the surrounding geography hard to follow.

In the end, The Archimedes Engine is two-thirds of a really compelling sci-fi action story hanging from the limp carcass of an unbearable bildungsroman about a whiny little space boy. Those two thirds were enough to get me over the finish line—of a story which overstays its welcome in the first place, mind you—but it does mean that the book never becomes more than trashy fun.

But what about its other purpose, which is to drum up interest in the Exodus game? I guess it did achieve that, in that having read it I am now quite keen to explore this setting in an interactive format. I will say though, having now gone and watched some trailers and gameplay footage, the writing completely fails to capture the game’s unique aesthetic. Then again, that might not be Hamilton’s fault; given the timelines of game development and book publishing, it’s entirely possible that said aesthetic hadn’t been created yet when he was writing this.