Shards of Earth

The Final Architecture #1

I love this author! Shards of Earth is about a time when humanity is threatened by the Architects. These are big, planet sized aliens that reconfigure worlds into twisted shapes utterly destroying it in the process. They are almost impossible to destroy or move from their purpose. Humanity has found that some special people, called ints, who have the ability to traverse ‘unspace’ with their minds and can communicate with the Architects.

One of these ints is part of a salvage crew and they are tasked to salvage something from unspace that looks awfully like an Architect destroyed it. Are the Architects back to finish off humanity? Many factions use this fact to further their agenda while this int gets caught in the middle. He’s one of the special ints that hasn’t gone crazy from the first wars.

Eyes of the Void

The Final Arhitecture #2

After finishing the first in this series, I rushed right into the second. This is always a risky proposition - either you will be satisfied by a sequel that is as good or better than the first, or disapointed by a lacklustre sequel; there is usually no middle ground here. Thankfully, I would put this book in the former category. It built upon the great things in book one and still pushed the story further along.

It delves further into the story of who are the Architects and where do they come from? How can we stop them?

PS I’ve never really been disapointed by any books written by Tchaikovsky so I’d encourage you to try him out. I have read many of his books!

He reminds me in some ways of Cherryh and her weird scifi worlds which aren’t always dominated by human-like aliens.

Rating: ★★★★★

Book #53-54 in my 2022 Reading Challenge