Exodus: The Archimedes Engine is a tie-in novel to the new RPG being released in 2027, also called Exodus. But it’s not just any tie-in novel. It’s a fully self-contained story told across two massive 900-page doorstop books, a prequel to the game, and penned by British Science Fiction legend Peter F Hamilton. I would have read it just because of Hamilton, but with the promise of a Mass Effect-like game in the works featuring the same intricate universe, reading the novel was a no-brainer. If you want to get into this new IP on the ground floor, it’s book time.
I have been a massive Peter F Hamilton fan for a very long time. Through the Greg Mandel series, the legendary Night’s Dawn trilogy, and the wonderful Commonwealth saga, for something close to 20 years. However, I’ll admit the Salvation Sequence and Great North Road had me wondering if he could still write them like he used to. They just didn’t give me that same sense of wonder.
Enter Exodus. In collaboration with the developers at Archetype Entertainment, and published by Wizards of the Coast (which is Hasbro – so you can bet that someone has also thought merchandising already), Hamilton has penned an absolute comeback novel, a wonder-filled epic that establishes the universe of the books and game with some flair, and then manages to take you on an adventure every bit as action packed and epic as anything from Mass Effect, or his earlier novels.
So to really do this justice is completely impossible, as it takes a gifted writer 900 pages, but I will try to distil the basics. 40,000 years in the future, humans have colonised the galaxy across hundreds of planets. Over that kind of timescale they have evolved, enhancing themselves genetically into myriad varieties, with the Celestials and mysterious Elohim at the very top of the hierarchy. Celestials are humans akin to gods with biological/magical powers that those in our time could never comprehend.
Humans left Earth in Arkships and while the first travelled extremely slowly, they got better and faster, and they reached planets at different rates, and became established, even as other arkships were still travelling and arriving. The premise of both the game and novel is that an Arkship from humanity’s long dark history arrives in the present of this new civilisation, but just as basic old-world humans, in a land of gods.
Ellie and her father arrive on an Arkship into this future reality and meet Finn, a mid-rung changeling human (halfway to a Celestial) disenchanted with his endless monotonous existence maintaining this multi-millennia-long status quo. He longs for adventure, and seeing his ticket offworld in their Arkship, trades them his family’s land to settle on in exchange for the Arkship itself. So begins a masterful adventure trying to get the Arkship spaceworthy for trade, and the great political ramifications of this new human settlement, the Arkship’s power, and what it could be able to do to the system’s economy.
While we don’t know lots of detail about the circumstances of the adventure in the game, it mirrors the novels, in that its stars a Traveller called Jun Aslan, who like Finn, can manipulate the Celestials technology.
There’s another few POVs in the book, most notably that of Thyra, a young clone of one of the 5 co-queens of the Centauri cluster. Celestials in a position as high as the one empress don’t just die – they live for hundreds of years, and then choose one of their many clone offspring to be their next host body. A melding of two minds takes place, but the original remains down a millennia-long mind-line forever the same person but with added traits.
Thyra is a bit of a wild card, spending the first part of the novel establishing her place as the queen’s next choice of body by killing off her fellow princess clones. It’s a wildly decadent and strange story, while at the same time being brutal and primal in a way that you’d expect us to have evolved away from. But really the Celestials are as human as we are, and less civilised.
Between Finn’s and Thyra’s stories, Exodus: The Archimedes Engine is a masterful novel that any gamer would enjoy – that thirst for adventure is palpable throughout. It’s the most inventive thing Hamilton has written in a while, and playing in a universe he has co-created with ex-Bioware devs at Archetype seems to have been the fire that he needed.
For more information on the novels, and the second in the duology coming out in June 2026, click here.
Exodus will be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Steam, and is slated for 2027.
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