{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "description": "This is my first time reading anything Peter F. Hamilton's written and it will not be my last. I spent years barely reading (books at least) or not reading at all and I can't shake the feeling that I'll never catch up. The Expanse series is what finally got me back in the habit of reading and I've had this lingering interest in finding comparable works since. Exodus isn't necessarily comparable to a universe built over an entire series of novels, but it feels like there's a kinship there. Exodus is epic, the world building is detailed, thoughtful and something to marvel at. There's a fair bit of setup and groundwork to be laid out, but Hamilton ties all the various threads of the story together brilliantly. It's all about humanity, but humanity 40,000 years in the future. That span of time has provided humanity with the opportunity to find a new home and leave their humanity behind. There are aliens, but those aliens were once human, they've simply been given enough time to become something else entirely. There's a lot of time spent in Exodus playing with the concept of time, long spans, time dilation — there's no faster than light travel, there's travel via Elohim gates that's close, but that's nearly entirely out of the grasp of baseline humans. We have a late-arriving generational ship in the Dilligent and their population is injected into a carefully curated and controlled human population. That commingling of vastly different human populations, naturally, results in upheaval. Power structures and norms are challenged — the dominion in which the humans find themselves values continuity above all else. The humans challenge this, fight against it, refuse to return to what has always been and that conflict is at the core of this entire story. That battle for autonomy, control of one's own destiny is the protagonist — Finn's — core motivation. His actions have a long tail that wrap in the rest of the human population, threaten and damage celestial stability. There are natural human tendencies, underdog battles, aliens that aren't aliens, detailed plots, political intrigue and jockeying and it is all bafflingly detailed and interconnected. I don't know how Hamilton crafted this, kept it together and made it all work so beautifully. But he did. I'm glad he did.",
  "path": "/reading/books/9780593357668/exodus",
  "publishedAt": "2025-06-05T00:00:00Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:sttgf52vkk46f6yuknvqxvgh/site.standard.publication/self",
  "tags": [
    "scifi",
    "fantasy",
    "fiction"
  ],
  "title": "Exodus"
}