Peter F Hamilton writes big science-fiction in every sense of the word. His stories span hundreds of worlds and societies, and, as those familiar with his works will know, carrying one of them around can mean serious effort: his largest work, the Night’s Dawn trilogy, weighs in at roughly 1.2 million words and over 3000 pages.

Modestly, for a man with clearly such a vivid and wide-ranging imagination, Hamilton lays part of the blame jokingly at the feet of the audience. “It has to be a fairly complex structure to make it believable,” he says, “the knowledge base has expanded for both the reader and the writer.” Complexity is Hamilton’s hallmark – the Night’s Dawn trilogy has its own official compendium, The Confederation Handbook. Whilst he might explain this away as simply being necessary to remain plausible, there is nonetheless a tangible feeling that Hamilton just loves the scope of fiction for its own sake: “If I don’t believe it, you won’t believe it,” he admits with a smile.

And believability is key for Hamilton, a man for whom the storyline is everything. Having a message, a point, is unnecessary he suggests, “polemics are boring. People who read the author’s politics into the story are pretty much always mistaken.” Entertainment is more important a goal to him than changing minds. On choosing to depict an evil communist government in his first work, Mindstar Rising, and corporate shenanigans in Fallen Dragon he reflects that both had rather more to do with a good plot than anything else. “It all helped the dynamic – it’s what I needed for the story,” dismissing my suggestion that he had an agenda behind his writing in his quiet yet forceful voice.

But it is hard not to be impressed with Hamilton’s powers of prediction. Writing in 1993 about the perils of a credit crash, pollution and an earth shattered by ‘The Warming’, in a time when the phrase ‘climate change’ was still the preserve of a few academics, surely he wanted to make us more aware of the future we might be making for ourselves? “Nope,” he smiles, “pure coincidence. If I was an economics genius I’d be rolling in money somewhere.” He looks up momentarily, perhaps imagining his own personal orbit of cash.

Rather than aiming for prediction, he sees the role of science-fiction to be similar to any other, acting partially as a mirror for the society in which it is written. “90% of what I write directly reflects the world around me. If I’d been writing it in the 40s or 50s aliens would have been invading because they wanted our gold and our women… there has to be another reason, it basically boils down to crusade… belief.”

The impact of religion on our world is something that Hamilton is wary of approaching directly in our interview, answering my question on his views that “religion can take many different forms, it all comes down to politics,” but it is something he deals with extensively in his work. He wrote the Night’s Dawn trilogy in the middle of the Bosnian crisis, which reflected in his work, he acknowledges. “So many counties close together, split by religion, split by politics. So I had the ‘ethnic streaming worlds’ – there was no way these two factions were going to live peacefully together.”

It seems ironic given the nature of his fiction, but it fundamentally all comes down to space, he suggests. If we all had a bit more space, he proposes, we would see far fewer conflicts. In the Night’s Dawn trilogy, “there is a world for everybody... so you live together – you can trade, talk, but you are not living in the same street. In that respect, it gives an image of our society basically calmed down. It didn’t work perfectly, but it worked better.”

Does he think we’ll ever achieve “a bit more space”? He is pessimistic, sadly. “With the predictable technology levels, we won’t be going off-planet, we won’t have my solution. I wish it were so, but not in my lifetime.”

I had hoped, on meeting him, that Hamilton would be somewhat more optimistic about the future; his work has humanity reaching for the stars. But in person, Hamilton remains a realist – and sees his work based in our own existence. Science-fiction does not have prophetic powers, he tells me, “I don’t believe any of my books will be our future.” But I am left with the feeling that science-fiction, although very much speculative, certainly has the capacity tell us a little more about ourselves whilst remaining hugely entertaining. It might be 3000 words, but it’s worth it.

 

Peter Hamilton In Brief

 

Kindle or Paperback?

Paperback, but I’m thinking of a Kindle for my birthday

Car or Motorbike?

Car

Crispy Duck or Tikka Masala?

Crispy Duck

Mac or Windows?

Mac – I just threw my PC out the window

Piano or Saxophone?

Piano

Staycation or Vacation?

Vacation

Country or City?

Country

Wine or Ale?

Ale

Valentine’s Day?

Yes

Radio 1, 2, 3, or 4?

None

Thing you’d save in a fire?

iPod