Shards of Earth
The Final Architecture series, Book 1
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: When the Architects came to civilized space, there was no warning and no defense, as the moon-sized entities peeled apart whole inhabited planets and sculpted them into bizarre shapes, seemingly without provocation or reason. Even Earth fell victim, humanity's homeworld destroyed in a matter of hours. Only a chance discovery lead to the intermediary project: experimental procedures and surgeries to turn human minds into something capable of touching the unknowable, navigating the unreal spaces and, somehow, turning aside the Architects. Idris was one of the first generations of intermediaries; along with Solace, a vat-grown Partheni warrior, they witnessed the last Architect attack.
That was decades ago now, yet somehow, even as the people of the galaxy slowly lose their wariness, Idris has neither aged nor slept. Intermediaries are still produced, but more for their usefulness at navigating unspace, enslaved by "leash contracts" and likely even subjected to psychological means of curbing their freedom - treatments Idris, as a first-generation "int", missed. These days, he works aboard the Vulture God, a patched-up deep space salvage vessel with a patched-up crew of spacer misfits, human and alien and artificial. When he found himself face to face with Solace again - still alive and relatively young, thanks to many years in deep freeze between missions for the Partheni nation - he knew trouble was coming.
Neither one of them expected that trouble to be a vessel lost in deep space, with all the earmarks of an Architect attack.
Is it a hoax, a fluke, or is the ultimate unstoppable enemy about to return to a civilized space still recovering from their last visit... a space that, fallen into partisan squabbles and power games, is woefully unprepared for the danger?
REVIEW: With many familiar trappings from the space opera genre - the ragtag ship with its found family crew, the many species of sapient aliens with many unknowable strains of intellect and logic, the political squabbles and space battles, the ancient alien artifacts and deep mysteries of the universe - Shards of Earth may not bring a ton of new material to the table, but it does deliver a solid story that never loses its momentum. Idris was scarred in innumerable ways by the first Architect war, scars worsened by both his inability to sleep and by his frequent trips to unspace, which can drive ordinary minds over the edge with just a single trip outside of a sleeping pod. Solace is a loyal soldier, doing her duty by tracking Idris down and offering him a place in the all-female Partheni nation, but she comes to question her loyalties and even the purity of her superiors' offer as she spends time among Idris and the Vulture God's crew, which provides a range of perspectives and personalities and skills (not to mention clashes). Along the way, they become entangled with cultists, crime lords, nativists and other political and ideological extremists who have been on the rise ever since the threat of the Architects ceased to be a uniting factor, and other dangers. There's a nice, adventurous, lived-in feel to the galaxy Tchaikovsky creates, the parts coming together into an interesting whole that held my interest from start to finish. I'm looking forward to the next installment.
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