Exodus: The Archimedes Engine

Exodus: The Archimedes Engine opens Peter F. Hamilton's Archimedes Engine duology forty thousand years after humanity's escape from a dying Earth. The arkships that reached the Centauri Cluster's habitable worlds gave rise to the Celestials, evolved transhumans who now rule the Crown Dominion and its allied houses, while later-arriving humans and their descendants live as a subject class with no claim to the stars they helped settle.

Finn Jalgori-Tubu has known nothing but the Crown Dominion's rule, but the sudden return of an arkship long thought lost gives him an opening to become a Traveler and reach for a future beyond Celestial control. Around him, the novel follows Thyra, a low-ranked heir fighting to secure her place within Celestial society, Gahji, a Celestial politician trying to make sense of events that shouldn't be possible, and Terence Wilson-Fletcher, a police detective pulled into a case that keeps widening.

The three threads converge across a densely built interstellar society, resolving the novel's central mysteries while setting up the second half of the duology, Exodus: The Helium Sea.