This is a long, long, sprawling space opera epic bursting with amazing technological ideas, and incredibly alien cultures and species, all of which is explored thoroughly in this hefty giant tome of a book. I was blown away by the amount of creativity at play here in terms of sheer imaginative power; this is my first Peter F. Hamilton exposure, and as a new kinda-fan I can see why he has the rep he has as a scifi author.

Unfortunately I think my personal taste doesn't align very well with Exodus, as I need characters I can emotionally connect with to keep me going and invested, especially with super lengthy epics such as this one; depth of character and emotional complexity was sacrificed for the sake of science fiction opera grandeur here, as there's simply too many ideas to explore and too big and sweeping a plot to do much else. As much as I was drawn in by the scifi-ness of it all, I struggled with wanting to drop it more than a handful of times, especially in the first half as the story kept introducing new disconnected plotlines and characters. Things take a very long time to start coming together, and even when they do late into the second half of the book, the whole thing ends in a pretty unsatisfying cliffhanger. I was already dreading trying to finish the book by a quarter of the way in, so struggling to get through a sequel of the same length is off the table for now. 

Still, I like Peter F. Hamilton and practically everything he came up with outside of the characters. I just wish he did it differently; maybe in several volumes with proper self contained plot lines and much more character work, or maybe with a few hundred pages less. I did become enough of a fan to check out the game this book ties into, and I'm playing with seeing if he has any shorter self contained novels that I might want to read. As for Exodus, I would totally still recommend it if you're more of a big plot and big scifi ideas type of reader, because it's still brilliant in that way; if you're an emotional-connection-to-character(s) type of reader like I am, this may end up being a struggle for you as well.