Adrian Tchaikovsky has fast become one of my favourite authors; within the span of four books I have read by him, I have come to the conclusion that the reader can never go wrong with Tchaikovsky. Shards of Earth, the first in The Final Architects trilogy, is another splendid example of Tchaikovsky’s phenomenal imagination and skill!

Earth, along with billions of its occupants, was destroyed—twisted and warped into a colossal work of art, in fact—by an inscrutable enemy larger than Earth’s moon that came from the far reaches of the universe, whom the surviving humans named the Architect. Earth was but one of the multitude of worlds reshaped into bizarre artworks by Architects irrespective of what species of sentient beings those worlds housed. The only thing that worked for humans against Architects were Intermediaries, or Ints—humans with surgically altered brains capable of connecting with the gargantuan consciousness of the Architects—who, somehow, made the Architects go away more than eighty years after they had first appeared. Presently, about forty years since the disappearance of Architects, Idris Telemmier—one of the very few surviving original Ints who is living obscurely as the navigator of a salvage ship travelling the space and the deep void—and his crew discover something that portends the return of the dreaded Architects. Can humanity, and the other organisms, thwart the Architects once again? Or, will life, in all its forms, be snuffed out by the monstrous entities?

With the entire universe as his canvas, Tchaikovsky paints a dazzling picture of multiple worlds inhabited by many unique, fascinating beings in Shards of Earth—the Parthenon: genetically engineered female warriors, the Hannilambra: crab-like business-minded aliens, the Hivers: highly evolved cyborg insect intelligence, the Tothiat: super-resilient composite species, and the Essiel: enigmatic masters of the Hegemony. Each of these species and characters has a unique personality and voice, and Tchaikovsky brings them all to life effortlessly. He has a lot of trust in his reader’s ability to figure out things and thrusts them straightaway into the thick of things; the initial chapters take quite some patience, attention and perseverance to get through. Once past the starting blocks though, it becomes a spectacular ride through space and unspace—the uncharted, lethal, maddening deep void beyond real space navigable only by human Ints and few other alien species. The complex and entirely absorbing plot has plenty of breath-taking action sequences, all vividly described in Tchaikovsky’s engaging, intelligent prose. The characters—human ones and aliens alike—are superbly crafted and will be remembered for a long time.

Amidst the frenzied action, there definitely are a few places, especially when Idris engages his mind with bigger consciousnesses, where the pages feel like dragging. But those parts are small and far between, and the rest of the book just keeps the reader in its mesmerising hold right up to the excellent finish—conclusive in many senses but holding enough in suspense to make the sequel impatiently awaited. Now that is what I, and anybody who has read this magnificent Sci-Fi / Fantasy / Space Opera, want the most: Bring out the next volume, and the one next to it, immediately!

Thank you, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Tor / Pan Macmillan, and NetGalley for the privilege of reading the ARC of Shards of Earth in exchange for my honest review!

This book is unputdownable - I burned through the (nearly) 600 pages in three evenings.

Fast paced, relatable characters (including the non-human ones), with the human factions often being their own worst enemies during a time of immense danger to all life in the Universe.

The joy of this book (for me) is that you get to know (and care for) multiple characters, and I felt upset when bad things happened to them - looking forward to the next books in the series.

Shards of Earth is the first book in a brand new series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I was lucky enough to have an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have to admit I’m usually more of a fantasy reader, I’ve tried some YA sci-fi before but this was my first introduction to the space opera genre.

This is the first book in the Final Architects series where we are introduced to a group of characters in space recovering from a war but the peace treaty is shaky. I felt like I was thrown into action straight away with a battle in space and I felt a little lost in the pages to start off with. However some scenes I felt as though a movie was unfolding in my mind. I liked the main characters solace and Idris. They both had strong personalities and I enjoyed solace’s humorous side.

I unfortunately couldn’t finish this book, I’m rating it 3 stars on the basis of what I’ve read so far and because it’s not the authors fault I just felt like this wasn’t my genre at all. I felt as though I was swimming in the deep end of sci-fi without having tested the waters properly first it was too heavy for me and I felt really lost and overwhelmed.

I think readers well versed in sci-fi and space operas will probably love this book, I’m going to stick to my fantasy books going forward however.

The Architects came for Earth first. Humanity had nothing to stop them, so Earth fell, torn asunder and remade at the Architect’s whim. Decades and many dead planets later, our last best hope were the Intermediaries, a handful of surgically altered humans borne into space by a female warrior caste, the genetically engineered Parthenon. At immense cost, the enemy was stopped … and went away.

Fifty years on, the Council of Human Interests, the governing body of the Colonies known as the Hugh, is on the brink of conflict with the Parthenon. Idris, an Intermediary instrumental in the last encounter with the Architects, now hiding from the Hugh lest he be forced into slavery, is now the navigator and pilot for a disparate crew on the salvage vessel, Vulture God. Wishing to avert a war the Parthenon order Solace, the warrior tasked with his protection during the war, to find him and convince him to join them and help them make their own Intermediaries. Idris wants no part of the Hugh or the Parthenon, but what he wants soon becomes irrelevant when the Vulture God discovers the wreck of a ship bearing the all too familiar signs of attack by the Architects.

Shards of Earth is a fantastic first book in what promises to be an outstanding space opera trilogy. Tchaikovsky has formed a rich tapestry of alien species and worlds, a devastating adversary, and a vividly imagined history, and peopled it with believable characters whom I came care about very quickly. The story is involved and complex and left me wanting the next book immediately. Yet another masterclass in sci-fi from Adrian Tchaikovsky!
I received an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Shards of Earth is my sixth book from Adrian Tchaikovsky and one unlike the others I read so far: this author moves from one kind of story to another with enviable ease, so that I’m now certain that no matter which work of his I pick up, I will be pleasantly surprised by what I find. This first volume in the Final Architects series brings us fully into the space opera genre with a story spanning many worlds and civilizations and introducing the most terrible kind of adversary, one which does not seem to act out of malice or thirst for power, but simply because that is its way - one for whom the words collateral damage or consequences seem to hold no meaning at all. More than once I have wondered how events of the past year have weighed on Adrian Tchaikovsky’s imagination as he crafted the Architects, entities that work according to their own inner programming (not unlike a virus!), unaware of the damage they are inflicting…

At the start of the novel, galactic civilization is two generations past a catastrophic event which threatened to annihilate every form of life - human or alien - in the universe: moon-sized things appeared literally out of nowhere, changing the shape of the worlds they encountered in a sort of destructively “artistic” way, erasing in the process all life present on those worlds. The Architects - so the mysterious entities were named - seemed attracted only by inhabited worlds, and their deadly attention did not spare either alien or human civilization: Earth was one of the worlds so reshaped, and the people who were able to escape from the cataclysmic remolding of their worlds lived like refugees under the constant threat of the appearance of an Architect in their skies. A last, desperate attempt was made to contact the aliens by genetically enhancing a group of human volunteers (called the Intermediaries) who would be able to communicate with the Architects in the hope of stopping the destruction: during an all-out battle involving the allied fleet created to face the threat, the Intermediaries were able to stop the mindless carnage, and the aliens disappeared just as swiftly as they had manifested.

Some fifty years after the end of the war, what had been an alliance forged under the threat of annihilation has now fractured into a number of governing bodies more often than not at odds with each other: danger forgotten, every one of them - including some criminal conglomerates - seeks power and dominance over the others. The Intermediaries, already marked in body and mind by the transformation, did not fare so well and most of them died, while a program to create more is underway using convicted criminals, not so much as a defense against a return of the Architects - which many deem impossible - but rather because one of the side effects of the genetic enhancing is the ability to navigate unspace, the ghastly nowhere between worlds. Idris Telemmier is the last one of the original group of Intermediaries, and he now works as a navigator for a crew of interstellar scavengers on a ship very aptly named Vulture God: he does not age, nor does he need sleep, but he’s a very troubled individual and all he wants is to be forgotten and to forget - as impossible as it is - the horrors he had to witness, which makes a strange discovery, made by the Vulture God’s crew in the far reaches of space, even more disturbing: the Architects might be coming back…

It takes a while for Shards of Earth to make the reader comfortable within its pages, or at least that was my experience at first: Tchaikovsky wastes almost no time in explaining his universe, plunging the audience in medias res so that one feels a little lost - that is, until a closer look at the character and civilizations list, not to mention the useful timeline, opens a window on this huge, complex background and everything falls into place. The aliens peopling the Galaxy are indeed quite bizarre creatures, confirming the author’s richness of imagination: they are not only weird-looking, but they come from equally outlandish civilizations and their interactions with the humans can go from the humorous to the quite terrifying. Yet it’s the human (or post-human…) characters I connected with more deeply, particularly the crew of the Vulture God, which gave me the same kind of wonderful vibes I could find in Firefly or The Expanse, making me feel perfectly at home with this group of mismatched individuals.

Idris is the one who required more “work” from me because at first he comes across as gloomy and sullen: it’s only as his story comes into light, bit by bit, that it’s possible to understand the depth of the damage inflicted on him first by the procedures necessary to turn him into an Intermediary, then by his war experiences and finally by the constant journeys into unspace - the navigational medium that can turn an unmodified human into a crazed wreck and weighs on an Intermediary with the conflicting sensations of loneliness and of a looming, threatening presence. If Idris is able to still maintain a grip on sanity it’s because of the bond he forged with his crew-mates, an apparently ill-assorted group that has grown into a found family whose interactions are a joy to behold - from expansive captain Rollo who calls the members of his crew “children”, to dour drone specialist Olli, whose stunted body made her a wizard in remote control of machinery; from crab-shaped alien tech Kit to lawyer Kris, whose main job is to protect Idris from being indentured by unscrupulous conglomerates, they all create a wonderful sense of familial cohesion that looks like the only barrier separating Idris from a devastating breakdown.

That’s the main reason the arrival of an old acquaintance of Idris places them all on defensive mode: Solace is a member of the Parthenon, a human faction that long ago left Earth establishing a society of parthenogenically created women-soldiers - she and her sisters fought valiantly against the Architects, but are now looked on with suspicion, not least because there is a great deal of misinformation about their civilization and goals. Solace is tasked with convincing Idris to help the Parthenon create their own Intermediaries, should they be needed with the possible return of the Architects, and when she joins the Vulture God she initially upsets the balance aboard the vessel, but as the days go on and a series of dramatic events plagues the crew, she feels torn between commitment to her duty and the growing sense of belonging that her adventures aboard the ship are bringing about.

As far as space opera goes, Shards of Earth is a perfect, quite engaging representative of the genre, and for this very reason I refrained from mentioning any detail from the fast-paced string of events at the core of this story. What I’m more than happy to share, however, is that the last 15-20% of the novel moves from a fast pace to a breakneck speed that had me turning the pages as quickly as I could, because the stakes were enormous and the various revelations beyond compelling. And the good news is that although this is the first volume in a series, it does not end in a cliffhanger: granted, we understand that the various pieces have just been set in motion on this galactic chessboard, but this segment of the story is tied up quite satisfactorily - although I would not mind reading the next book right now ;-)

If you are a fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky, I’m certain you will enjoy the depth and scope of his new work, and if you never read any of his books, this might very well be an amazing introduction. Either way, you will not be disappointed….

This is a space opera that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. I have been consuming a lot of science-fiction lately and I’ve found I am really enjoying it. I thought the writing style was so good and I found it good to read. I thought most things were understandable and it is an accessible book for people.

The worldbuilding is amazing and I really liked it. The human colonies were so good to see and I liked how the different worlds were set up. There are of course aliens in the book too. Some aliens were really weird. Someone I want to know more about is Ash who is the sow survivor of a planet of people who were destroyed by the Architects. The architects themselves were okay, I didn’t feel much for or about them.

The characters were okay, I didn’t really connect to any of them and the overall plot was similar to some other sci-fi books and films. I did like the overall story but it didn’t grip me at any point. It took me awhile to read this book because of that. I would recommend this book to sci-fi lovers and fans of the author will most likely love it. I may try this book again in audio format as that’s my preferred way to sci-fi.

Most reasons to be cheerful may still be on hold, but this is already the third new Adrian Tchaikovsky book 2021 has brought me* and it's exactly the space opera hit I needed. It's set decades after the destruction of Earth by the moon-sized, unknowable alien Architects – think Galactus if, instead of being peckish, he was bent on turning planets into objets d'art. Also, they have to be inhabited, and even the survivors admit a certain intent and beauty to the results. First realisation: at present, I can't read ends of the world that are as shabby and local as the real one, so John Crowley's Ka is staying firmly on the shelf, unread, and I didn't even bother requesting the new Valente or Vandermeer. But it turns out this sort of big, alien, bang rather than a whimper sort of doomsday is absolutely fine. Humanity already had space colonies at the time, too, so it's not even an evacuation from scratch a la Seveneves, though billions were still lost. Ultimately, we managed to drive off the Architects, though still nobody is entirely sure how, only that the surgically and chemically altered humans made into space navigators known as Intermediaries were key. A couple of generations along, as has been known to happen in the aftermath of a victory, the various human and post-human factions exist in a state of cold war, where exactly the resources it would make sense to share in case the Architects return are also the ones they might turn on each other. So the authorities of the human colonies as a whole – known, wonderfully, as 'Hugh' – are looking sceptically at the Partheni, all-female vat-grown warrior 'Angels Of Punching You In The Face', "beautiful and deadly like highly polished knives", who served as humanity's shield in the war, but are now feared to have sinister designs on the rest of the species, with its genetic flaws and its men...and as for the distributed consciousness of the Hivers, well. Lurking behind all this, shifting the Overton window in the very worst ways, are the Nativists and their stab-in-the-back myths about how old-fashioned humanity could have won more, or better, or something – and while analogous Trump/Brexit elements have cropped up in a lot of recent Tchaikovsky, these wretches work a lot better than most of their predecessors, precisely because the parallel isn't as overly-exact as it was in Bear Head or Doors Of Eden.

And of course, because this is space opera, there are aliens too – although because it's smart space opera, they have factions within their races too, rather than each standing as monolithic foreigner-substitutes. They are also very alien, especially the Hegemony, giant shellfish who administer a sort of cult/empire hybrid whose worlds have a mysterious invulnerability to the predation of the Architects. Of them all, though, I was most intrigued by Ash, the last survivor of a planet destroyed long before Earth, who kicks off the plot and then vanishes in a way suggesting a significant role in the remainder of the trilogy. Ash's harbinger role deepened the Galactus vibes by reminding me of Ultimate Vision – though also of the single escapees the Mongols would permit when they destroyed a city. In some ways, though, the Architects are probably more of a Lovecraftian vision, not in the sense of being a direct steal of his Old Ones with their tentacles and consonants, but by finding another route to his underlying point, the way the universe is full of things that will destroy us not out of malice, but simply because we don't register to them as worthy of note. This sense only deepens as we learn more about the mysterious Originators whose relics litter the galaxy, or the sense of being watched that lurks for those unlucky enough to be awake on the unspace jumps between worlds. Unspace being one of many times – see also the way that space combat and shielding here may still be cheating in terms of actual physics, but at least do so in novel and interesting ways – that Tchaikovsky is clearly running through a space opera checklist, but getting away with it. I kept getting echoes of recent (or at least they seem that way to me, because I am old) exercises in the subgenre, like Banks' Algebraist or Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep, and also of the current flagbearer for the stage where interplanetary SF is just about to evolve into space opera, The Expanse. After all, the leads here mostly represent one rag-tag crew with interesting pasts, accidentally in possession of a Macguffin way above their pay grade, who thus find themselves pursued by an awful lot of bigger, more dangerous players, often in such a way that shit is kicking off on at least three levels simultaneously. And yet, just as he normally does, Tchaikovsky gets away with any similarities by being good enough that it feels like making it new, rather than a hollow exercise in emulation. Some of that is simple pizzazz; some of it's the degree of thought put into the various characters and worlds and species; at times it's down to detail as fine as the phrasemaking, as when two twinkly old gents have an 'avuncle-off'.

Of course it still has its unavoidable Event resonances, right down to humanity now dating time simply in Before and After, or haunted by memories of all that's been lost. Worse, the spine of the story is the underlying horror of people slowly building new lives for themselves once the crisis is over, then suddenly having to deal with the nightmarish possibility of its return – something I suspect is going to come back to me whenever the whispers of the next pandemic start mounting. But for all that, the carnage, the occasional hideously detailed bits of gore, the abiding impression right now is of a page-turning (or in my case, screen-flicking) romp, which very much hit the spot.

*Obviously that's not all he's published; what kind of sluggard do you take him for? There was a fourth too, but it's the sequel to one I've not read.

(Netgalley ARC)

My only complaint about this book is a lack of space faring spiders and octopi 😉

Yet another inventive, creative and enthralling book from this author, i alway enjoy reading his books and always buy them in audiobook when available and I will be doing so with one soon as possible