It’s a genre that includes everything from steampunk to Dune. So what does Peter F Hamilton, who is billed on the cover of his books as “the UK’s number one science-fiction writer” and is known for his sweeping vistas of starships, alien worlds and galactic confederations, consider science fiction to be?

“Science fiction is an extrapolation of trends to the extreme, and seeing what problems and wonders that can deliver to us as a species,” he tells Supercluster. “Maybe that will allow us to examine ourselves – who and what we are now – from a different perspective. That’s what the fundamental of science fiction is to me. Given time and an increase in our knowledge base, I can explore the way we will evolve both culturally and, in the far future, biologically.”

Hamilton is currently nearly 30 books into a novel-writing career that began in 1993 with Mindstar Rising, focusing on the exploits of former soldier and psychic detective Greg Mandel. Hamilton, though, is perhaps most well known for two sprawling space operas, namely the Night’s Dawn trilogy and the sprawling Commonwealth Saga consisting of seven novels and a volume of short stories. In general though, one thing that Hamilton doesn’t usually do is write stories that are short. His lengthiest tomes are over a 1,000 pages, and his latest novel Exodus: The Archimedes Engine, released this September just gone, isn’t far behind at 928 pages. Yet as large as his books are in page length, they’re even larger in scale, telling the tales of star-spanning societies across millennia as they deal with threats as diverse as alien invasions, a mysterious void lurking at the heart of the galaxy, or the return of the dead to possess the living.

Exodus: The Archimedes Engine, which is the first part of a duology, sees Hamilton raise his game once more not just through the telling of the story, but the relatively unique way in which the novel has been developed. You see, it’s all based on a computer game.

Exodus is an RPG produced by Archetype Entertainment and set for release in December. It stars Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey, and Hamilton was brought in early in the game’s development to help build the universe in which Exodus takes place. Not only did Hamilton succeed in doing so, he was able to turn his world-building into two novels, The Archimedes Engine and its intended sequel.

“It is set in the universe of Exodus, but isn’t a novelization of the game,” says Hamilton. “The story is one I came up with. It takes place roughly 150 years after the game, in a different solar system several light years away.”

The in-story background to both the game and the novel is that humanity was forced to flee a dying Earth in a giant exodus that saw huge ark-ships set sail in search of new homes out among the stars. A group of the ark-ships chance upon a star cluster containing habitable planets that the survivors of Earth could settle on. And so the call went out to all the ark-ships to turn around and head for the cluster. Over 40,000 years the ark-ships arrive in dribs and drabs, their crews in suspended animation, only to find that the original settlers of the star cluster have evolved into beings who call themselves Celestials. Yet there’s nothing celestial about them, for they rule with an iron fist. Game players adopt the role of Travelers, who venture between the stars being relentlessly chased by the Celestials, but the effects of time dilation mean that the actions of the Travelers can ripple across centuries while the Travelers are voyaging, having dramatic repercussions for the rest of humanity.

“The world-building was a collaborative venture,” says Hamilton. “The game-makers had a rough outline for what they wanted, and I came along and added flesh to the skeleton.”

In Hamilton’s novel, the arrival of a long-lost ark-ship at the cluster gives the novel’s hero, Finn, the opportunity to escape the repressive regime of the Celestials and to become a Traveler and explore the depths of space to try and save humanity.

“I think, at 40,000 years, the Exodus universe is the furthest into the future I’ve gone,” says Hamilton. “The longer the canvas of time you can write, the more possibilities you have as a writer. The far-future is when you can let your imagination run riot.”

Sometimes presented under the guise of generation ships, ark-ships are a staple of science fiction, a requirement of the limitations of the speed of light and how long it would take to make an interstellar journey. Unlike the USS Enterprise, which zips between star systems in the space of an episode of Star Trek, in reality a voyage to another star would be long and arduous. At sub-light speeds of a few tens of per cent of the speed of light, it could take decades or centuries to reach the closest stars. Even at the speed of light, it would take millennia to journey any appreciable distance across the galaxy. Hence ark-ships, with allusions to Noah’s Ark, which carry on board everything required to survive the very long journey and settle on a new world at the end of it. Sometimes in fiction the crew might be in suspended animation, or they might be awake, and many generations might be born and die before the ark-ship reaches its destination.

Ark-ships are often featured in Hamilton’s work. For example, when aliens invade in both the Commonwealth Saga and his Salvation Sequence, one route of escape is in ark-ships. Hamilton has also written an audiobook series about an ark-ship, consisting of three novels: A Hole in the Sky, The Captain’s Daughter and Queens of an Alien Sun. These have yet to be published in printed form, but along with Exodus they show Hamilton’s willingness to look beyond the printed page as a medium for story-telling. 

For example, there was already lots of reference artwork for the game when Hamilton began working on it, allowing him to literally picture the universe in which he would be writing. “Having visual references was a departure for me, which I found really helpful – it certainly made me consider things from a new angle,” he says. “So after this very positive experience, I’d certainly be open to consider how stories can be told in different media.”

Interstellar travel in Hamilton’s novels isn’t always a slog. In particular, his Commonwealth Saga features a rather unique way of traveling from planet to planet: by train.

Okay, that’s slightly disingenuous – the trains pass through wormholes linking planet to planet, but it’s an example of how Hamilton is able to skillfully take a piece of established science-fiction technology and then put a unique spin on it. In the Commonwealth, you can catch a connection at New York’s Grand Central Station and 15 minutes later be on a brand new planet, for example. This rail network, and the wormholes that enable it, is the basic infrastructure holding together the many worlds of the Commonwealth in Hamilton’s fictional 24th century.

The wormhole technology was invented by Hamilton’s long-running characters Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaacs in 2050, when they memorably beat Wilson Kime, commander of the first crewed mission to Mars, to walk on the red planet. Because they hold the patents to the wormhole technology, using it to found their company CST (Compression Space Transport) that runs  the wormhole rail network, Nigel and Ozzie quickly become the richest men in the Commonwealth. While Ozzie generally keeps out of Commonwealth politics while living in his own personal asteroid, Nigel is at the forefront of this futuristic society.

Incredibly wealthy men with a philanthropic streak and who drive society are a frequent character trope in Hamilton’s work and it’s tempting to draw comparisons  with certain billionaire owners of companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. Where does Hamilton stand on how much we should rely on these billionaires, whose intentions may or may not be to benefit humankind as a whole, to drive space exploration and technology in the future?

The current circumstances are “all down to politics, unfortunately,” believes Hamilton. He points out that the great advances of the Apollo age were driven by Cold War rivalry, and while the old adversarial nature of the east versus west divide is rearing it’s ugly head again, it has yet to manifest in another space race. For now, “The current driver is focused squarely on the cost reduction of getting a payload to orbit, which thanks to the technologies primed by the advances in the 1960s and progress with automated manufacturing, has become more economic for private enterprise,” says Hamilton. “Governments, aside from the military, have moved on to other concerns.”

This means it’s the billionaires who have been able to fill that space and take a lead, but Hamilton doesn’t believe that space will only be the province of the absolute wealthiest for too long.

“Personally I regard what’s happening now as an intermediate stage,” says Hamilton. “With reducing launch costs, space becomes available to smaller research institutions and mere millionaires who can launch smaller projects across a much wider range of disciplines.”

So unlike his Commonwealth novels, where rejuvenation technology allows people to stay forever young and maintain their grip on society, politics and the economy (actions that Nigel laments having done in a later novel), Hamilton doesn’t see space exploration as being dictated by the richest few for long. That’s got to be a good thing, to avoid one or two people’s visions becoming the de facto future for humankind – and besides, the CEO of SpaceX is no Nigel Sheldon.

Hamilton’s rejuvenation technology, first encountered in his 2002 novel Misspent Youth (which acts as a kind of precursor to the Commonwealth Saga) is the other great advancement that helps shape Commonwealth society, with Nigel being over a thousand years old by the time of the last book (so far) in the series. And when a character grows tired of living a biological life, they can download themselves into the Advanced Neural Activity (ANA), a kind of virtual existence that almost guarantees immortality. So I put the question to Hamilton: would he like to live forever?

“I’m not sure about living forever, but I wouldn’t say no to a couple more centuries,” he admits. “If nothing else, because I’m curious to see where we’re going as a species.”

In his Commonwealth books, rejuvenation arguably allows society to remain pretty much as it was in terms of its culture (at least until the invention of the ANA). A visit to any of the Commonwealth’s ‘Big15’ industrial worlds would be like visiting any large western city on Earth today. They are not radically different societies. 

However, Hamilton wonders whether in reality the ability to live for at least many centuries would really shake up our viewpoint.

“If life extension does become possible, I believe it would completely change our outlook, and haul our current culture into a much-needed mature outlook,” he says. By a mature outlook, he means one that looks beyond the next quarter and puts our lives, and the repercussions of our actions, in much broader contexts. “The current short-termism that dominates our mentality and planning is not doing us any favors.”

It’s hard to argue with any of that – just look at how efforts to keep global warming below the 1.5-degree Celsius target of the Paris Agreement are continually postponed by nations as they worry more about elections, the next economic quarter and other short-term problems at the expense of the future. Perhaps there’s a conceptual barrier that prevents generations worrying about the future if they’re not going to be there. If we could suddenly start rejuvenating our bodies and living for longer, then what happens next century would take on greater importance to people because we’d have to live through it.

It has been suggested by some futurists that societies whose population live longer might become more averse to risk, too afraid to jeopardize their long lives and die centuries or millennia too early through accident or war. This doesn’t stop Hamilton’s characters regularly throwing themselves into danger – although with their ability to be re-lifed using backed-up memories and clones of their bodies, the personal risks aren’t exactly the same, except for when his fictional civilizations face existential risks.

In real life Hamilton does think things are improving. I asked him how the world has changed since he wrote Mindstar Rising in 1993.

“There’s been a lot of progress since the 1990s, in the advance of technology and society’s attitudes in general, most of which has been for the better,” he says. “What’s happened, and the changes I’ve seen, in the past 30 years has certainly made me aware of the effects that technology can have on life in general, but knowledge also throws limitations into sharp focus. For instance, we now know how difficult long-duration spaceflight actually is for the human body.”

In Hamilton’s writing, humans adapt to living in space, or just living in a highly technological future, in different ways. In his Night’s Dawn trilogy, set in the 27th century, humanity is divided into the Adamists, who are more regular human beings though some of whom have seen their bodies changed by having to adapt to  microgravity through the generations, and the Edenists who have bio-engineered an ‘affinity gene’ that allows them to telepathically communicate with their biological spaceships and upload themselves into their biotech to effectively live forever. In the Commonwealth Saga we see the continued evolution of humankind, with the development of ‘Highers’ whose bodies are able to regenerate without undergoing rejuvenation, ‘Advancers’ who employ genetic manipulation, and Accelerators who seek to evolve into a post-physical existence beyond even the confines of the ANA. In Hamilton’s three-book Salvation Sequence, humans are biomodified to fight a seemingly hopeless war. And then of course we have the Celestials in Exodus, biologically and technologically advanced, but perhaps their ethics haven’t kept pace.

Despite the trials and tribulations his characters often face, Hamilton’s post-scarcity societies are places most of his readers would like to live.

“I do aim to provide a degree of hope for the future in what I write, even though my characters get put through hell to reach that opportunity,” Hamilton says.

And as readers, we get to join them on their journey through hell, and indeed Hamilton has many readers – his books have sold millions of copies. Now, with the Exodus project, he’s able to broaden his readership by venturing into the world of gaming. We can expect the sequel to Exodus: The Archimedes Engine in December 2025, and after that who knows, maybe a return to the Salvation or Commonwealth universes, or something new? With Peter F Hamilton, the sky is the limit.