Shards of war online3/17/2023 The story moves from world to world in search of items and answers (five parts, one for each planetary system visited), half quest and half a series of frying-pan-to-fire chases and escapes. Thereafter they encounter, evade, bamboozle, fight, or run from human-government undercover operatives human Nativist xenophobes alien-worshiping cultists an alien gangster (The Unspeakable Aklu, the Razor and the Hook) and the persistent aforementioned aristocrat and his gang of goons. Extricating Idris from the grasp of a greedy planetary aristocrat and his gang of hired muscle provides the first get-out-of-town sequence and gives Solace the chance to join the crew. Most are indentured by “leash contracts,” but Idris’ nearly unique independent status does not prevent unscrupulous operators from treating him like a fugitive slave. But Idris is himself also a prize, since Intermediaries are rare, expensive to create, crucial to interstellar travel, and therefore valuable. Two are fairly traditional: the salvaged wreck of a ship that may signal the return of the Architects, and a container of strangely potent ancient alien artifacts. The story links and braids a series of pursuits and escapes, motivated by three McGuffins. Idris is a valued part of a motley but tight-knit multispecies crew that includes the fatherly, faintly Falstaffian Captain Rollo Kitterling, a “crab-like” Hannilambra accountant who rents out advertising space on his carapace Olli, a physically disabled engineer, dependent on a highly adaptable Swiss-Army-knife exoskeleton and remote drones Medvig, a collective-personality AI whose insect-like units also reside in an artificial mechanical body and Kris, Idris’s agent and the ship’s attorney and fixer, whose law school had a strong sideline in knife-duelling. She finds Idris working as pilot of the itinerant salvage vessel Vulture God, using his altered senses to guide it through the deeply disturbing strangeness of unspace while his shipmates cold-sleep in mental safety. Myrmidon Solace is a soldier of the Parthenon, an all-female-clone military society, and Idris Telemmier is a neurologically-surgically-mentally altered Intermediary, and they are part of a multispecies alliance facing one of the unstoppable, moon-size Architects that appear out of nowhere (well, out of “unspace”) and turn an entire world into an “intricately crafted floriform sculpture… intentional and organized, all the way down to the atomic level.”įorty years after the strange ending of that war, the Parthenon could really use Idris’s abilities as an interstellar navigator (and possible weapon), so former-comrade Solace is dispatched to persuade, bribe, or maybe even kidnap him into Partheni service. The prologue offers minimal setup information: that “in the seventy-eighth year of the war… the lights of human civilization across the galaxy had been going out,” and then it introduces two central characters in an elliptical battle sequence. I have a sweet tooth for such concoctions, and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shards of Earth is a particularly appealing example of the omnium-gatherum adventure. Corey, Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, Alastair Reynolds, and of course the late lamented Iain M. To list a handful of recent practitioners: Neal Asher, James S.A. And it seems that the named subgenre most friendly to such an approach is the “space opera”–or, to be precise, the interstellar/interplanetary adventure, especially the far-future variety. Of course, science fiction has always had a kitchen-sink side, but at some point the combination of authorial ingenuity and audience familiarity made such busyness commercially viable, if not explicitly named. ![]() ancient-alien-nanotech monsters starship battles and arranged marriages and formal dinner parties in spaaace. Once upon a time I used the term “recombinant SF” to describe stories that whipped multiple ideas and themes and gadgets and speculations and story-patterns into busy, complicated, surprising concoctions: a Chinese AI emperor and Tibetan yak-wranglers on a terraformed Mars a moon-size ancient alien and clone-soldiers on a deathworld noir detectives and asteroid miners vs. Shards of Earth: The Final Architecture Book One, Adrian Tchaikovsky ( Tor 978-1-5290-5188-9, $28.00, 549 pp, hc) August 2021.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |