Archimedes Engine Wiki

Exodus: The Archimedes Engine

Exodus: The Archimedes Engine is a 2024 science-fiction novel by Peter F. Hamilton set tens of thousands of years after humanity fled a dying Earth. In the dense Centauri Cluster, evolved transhumans known as Celestials rule sprawling dominions while later-arriving humans live under their control — until politics, rebellion, and a world-moving engine force a confrontation.

Overview

Millennia after the Sol exodus, the Centauri Cluster is the stage for Celestial great houses and their client populations. The Crown Dominion — an alliance of royal houses under an Imperial Accord — sits at the centre of the novel’s politics. Uranic humans, descendants of later arkship waves, occupy intermediate status: more capable than baseline humans in some ways, yet still ruled by proxy for Celestial interests on worlds such as Gondiar and Anoosha.

Three main threads interlock. Young Uranic aristocrat Finn Jalgori-Tobu is bound and thrown from a plane over Anoosha after a failed heist, survives, and is rescued by crew from the newly arrived arkship Diligent. On Gondiar, detective Terence Wilson-Fletcher investigates subversion and finds Celestial manipulation beneath Uranic unrest. At court, Queen Helena-Chione of Wynid and her congregant daughter Thyra navigate succession, mindline politics, and the wider Crown Dominion struggle for power.

The strategic prize is Dolod, a gas giant steered toward the Kelowan system by an ancient Archimedes Engine. Control of its trajectory — and of technologies such as ZPZ generators and neural interfaces — becomes the hinge between resistance hopes and Celestial order.

The novel is an original tie-in and narrative prequel for Exodus, a science-fiction action-adventure role-playing game due in 2027 from Archetype Entertainment, a division of Wizards of the Coast. It is the first of two Hamilton novels set in that universe; the second, Exodus: The Helium Sea, concludes the story and was published in June 2026.

Setting

Browse the world through category hubs:

  • Locations — systems, worlds, and the arkship Diligent
  • Factions — Celestials, Crown Dominion, Uranics, Travelers, and liberation movements
  • Technology — Archimedes Engine, mindline, livestone, drives, and interfaces

Major characters

Full cast listings live on the Characters hub.

See also