Peter F. Hamilton is a British science-fiction author, born in Rutland in 1960, one of the foremost writers of modern space opera - and a byword for vast, densely plotted, galaxy-spanning epics.
Largely self-taught as a writer - he left off studying English literature at sixteen - he sold his first short story in 1988 and went on to build some of the biggest canvases in the genre, novels of enormous length and scope that interlace dozens of characters across whole future civilisations.
He made his name with the Night's Dawn trilogy, which opens with The Reality Dysfunction, and cemented it with the Commonwealth universe - the Commonwealth Saga beginning with Pandora's Star, and the later Void trilogy and Chronicle of the Fallers set in the same sprawling future. His more recent Salvation Sequence opens a fresh, unrelated space-opera setting. Across all of them run his hallmarks: faster-than-light travel and rejuvenation, grand political sweep, and mysteries that unfold over thousands of pages.
Ambitious on a scale few writers attempt, he offers the immersive, all-consuming reading experience that space-opera devotees prize above all.
