Sources and provenance

Primary source

The novel itself — Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton — is the only authority for anything in the story. Every character, place, faction and technology article is an original prose summary written for this wiki. Long quotations from the novel are deliberately avoided.

The book’s own “Timeline of the Centauri Cluster” is the authority for the macro history (Exodus era through the Present era). Where this wiki and the book disagree, the book is right. Corrections are expected.

Real-world facts, with references

These are the publication and tie-in claims the wiki makes about the actual book and its surrounding franchise. Each was checked against the reference given on 25 July 2026.

Secondary sources used as verification aids

These are not authorities for story content. They are public materials that can help catch missed names, order events, or locate franchise vocabulary. Any conflict with the novel is resolved in the novel’s favour. Spelling on this wiki always follows the subject’s own article, not a recap’s typo.

A longer inventory — publishers, TTRPG books, review links, what to ignore, and a recommended verification workflow — is kept for maintainers in the repository at docs/external-sources-research.md.

Terms checked against the book itself

Nightweid, the hazard named on Plot summary, Chapter summaries and Elsbeth McQuillan, was verified on 25 July 2026 against the novel’s own text through the publisher’s authorized Google Books preview of the Random House edition. An in-book search for the term returns seven snippets, at pages 557, 581, 591 and 598–601: creatures that hunt prey, chase a crew down a tunnel, and mass as a “nightweid swarm” and a “flock closing fast”. A briefing a few pages earlier, at 549–550, warns of “avian predators” in the same deep-dark descent. The wiki calls them swarming winged predators and stops there.

The fan wikis classify nightweid as “Awakened avians”, and that is not carried over. Awakened is the novel’s term for neurologically enhanced animals, but it appears nowhere in the nightweid pages. Avian is the novel’s own word for the hazards of that descent — yet the creature described a few pages later is leathery-winged and insect-eyed, bat-shaped rather than bird-shaped, and the book pointedly withholds a taxonomy in the scene: a character asks “What are they?” and is told “Let’s not find out, yeah?” Those two wikis are also one lineage rather than two witnesses; the second is a verbatim copy of the first, which a single editor wrote before any citation was added.

Changelings, Gath, Moaksha and rekaul were checked the same way on 25 July 2026, after a reader noticed the wiki never mentioned Changelings at all. In-book searches return 8, 9, 10 and 10 snippets respectively, spanning pp. 92–105, 135, 141, 194, 218, 256–261, 312–314, 341, 347–348, 410, 436, 545–551, 577–580, 658 and 855. Those pages carry everything the Changelings article states: engineering used to go sideways into niches rather than upward, the Gath as gentle giants built for heavy labour and exploited on Gondiar, the Moaksha as quadrupeds penned and drained of rekaul until their brains deteriorate, and a court ruling out Gath and humans alike as Engine operators.

Two limits of the method, recorded because they cut both ways. The passage describing the creature’s anatomy is on page 589, inside the sequence but in a snippet that does not itself contain the word, so reading it as a nightweid is inference from position rather than direct attestation. And the same index returns nothing for phrases demonstrably present on a page it has just returned — so a query that finds nothing proves nothing.

Book, game, and franchise chronology

The novel and the forthcoming Archetype Entertainment game share a setting but are not the same story. The publisher and the game’s own site both call the novels prequels, which is a statement about release order rather than about in-story dates; readers and interviews have disagreed about where the books actually sit relative to the game’s present. This wiki does not invent a reconciliation, and no article here asserts an interval between the two.

• In-story years and event order follow the novel (and this wiki’s reconstructed timeline labels — see below).
• Franchise vocabulary from official game materials is used only where it matches or clearly extends terms the novel already establishes.
• Real-world publication order and game release dates belong on Book, not in character or location articles.

Reconstructed, not canon

Three parts of this wiki are scaffolding built to make the story navigable. They are useful for finding your place; they are not the novel’s own structure, and they should not be quoted as fact.

Timeline years

The ~42,3xx figures are not dates the novel prints. They are reverse-engineered from in-story “N years ago” dialogue, spoken by characters whose own clocks disagree because of relativistic travel. The same approach appears in independent public recaps; agreement on a label does not make the number canon. Treat every year on that page as a working label for ordering events, not as a calendar. The ordering is more trustworthy than the numbers.

Chapter summaries

The numbered rows are sequential summary units invented for this wiki, not the novel’s chapters. The book interleaves many short point-of-view chapters across concurrent threads, and the units group them by thread and beat instead. Numbers will not line up with your copy.

Article illustrations

The portraits and ship plates in article infoboxes are original illustrations made for this wiki, not artwork from the novel, its covers, or the wider franchise. They are generated by an image model from written briefs kept with the wiki’s source. The novel describes only a minority of its cast, so most likenesses are inference. Traits it does establish are followed — Celestial height and bloodstone court fashion, the Heresy six-limb build and four eyes, the Talloch-Te five-eyed primary body and multi-body architecture, Uranic human scale, arkship and charter-hull classes — and everything below that level is invented to fill the frame. Treat them as reading aids rather than depictions: no detail in an image is a fact about the book. Where an image and an article disagree the article is right, and where an article and the novel disagree the novel is right.

A review on 26 July 2026 re-checked the art against the novel’s own text rather than against those briefs, and found the briefs had been the weaker document: for most characters they described a job rather than a face. Twelve portraits are known to contradict the book and are queued for replacement — Captain Dejean, who is a woman in the novel and a man in the picture; Olomo, who has four eyes and is drawn with two; Josias Aponi, whose enormous beard and grey-blue eyes are both missing; Lord Stethos-Thierry, whose scarlet-and-grey robes and bloodstone are drawn as black robes and machinery; Lord Gahiji, who dresses carelessly in the novel and is the best-dressed figure here; Elsbeth McQuillan, whose eyes should be blank mechanical spheres; and Makaio, Thyra, Helena-Chione, Carolien-Amaia, Valdier and Eleanor Aponi on further points.

One error runs through the whole Celestial cast rather than any single picture. Bloodstone is a calcium-like growth of the body — turquoise and gold on one queen, black and green on one archon, orange on another queen, and never a cut red gem anywhere in the novel. The illustrations render it almost everywhere as ruby crystal, the colour of the real-world mineral that shares its name rather than of the thing in the book. Every Celestial portrait checked has it wrong, so assume the rest do too until each is replaced.

A further sweep of the whole novel on 26 July 2026 added two more: Captain Andino, who is a woman with mechanical lens tubes in place of eyes and pistons either side of her neck, is drawn as an ordinary man; and Medusa, whose name comes from rainbow braids threaded with machinery that move like snakes, has neither those nor her black skin. Where an image and an article disagree, the article is right.

Cover image

The hub that lists the book wikis shows the publisher’s jacket for Exodus: The Archimedes Engine. It is the one image on this site not made for it. The jacket is copyrighted by its publisher and is reproduced at the same low resolution Wikipedia hosts it at — 256×389 — to identify the edition these articles cover. Wikipedia carries the same file as non-free content under a fair-use rationale, which covers their use and is not a licence for anyone else’s. No claim is made over the artwork, and it is not used inside any article.

What is not used

Unauthorized full-text copies of the novel (including dumps on code hosts) are not sources for this project. AI “book summary” sites and spoiler-free marketing blurbs alone are too thin or too error-prone to seed articles. Game trailers and creature shorts are flavour for the wider IP, not continuity for Hamilton’s plot.

What is not recorded

This wiki was seeded in July 2026, and the material consulted at the time was not logged line by line against the novel. The references above cover real-world publication facts and name the main secondary aids available for later verification. They do not mean every plot, character and setting claim on this site has been re-checked against the book since seeding.

So: where an article states a name, a relationship or a sequence of events, it is being reported in good faith but often without a citation behind it. The project README records the writing conventions, including the rule that a short accurate stub is preferred over an invented detail. Pages known to be thin say so with an explicit stub notice, as on Boksrock.

See also

• Book overview — publication facts in infobox form
• Timeline
• Chapter summaries
• Main Page