![]() In true space opera fashion, it is a common occurrence. And you still hate us for it.”Īfter a quote like this, I bet at least a few of you know if Shards of Earth will work for you.īut you see, I haven’t even mentioned the FTL travel. ![]() … All we ever did was put our lives on the line for you. Why couldn’t we just come back and be your wives and daughters again? You really think we quit Hugh because we had some designs on your planets? Because we wanted to line all your menfolk up against a wall, and make everyone else like us? We left because you hated us and would have used your laws to break us if we’d stayed. And then, when the war was over, you started asking why we had to keep on being different to you. “We were the shield and sword of the Colonies,” the Partheni went on. She had fought in the war, faced the Architects. Kris belatedly remembered this wasn’t just third-generation ancestral pride Solace had been there. We were the line.” And the softer edges of her voice were ablating off, revealing only steel beneath. And nobody remembers we died for the Colonies, above a hundred worlds, during the war. We’re warmongers, we’re man-haters, we’re unnatural, born in a lab, indoctrinated. “I know that in the Colonies they say a lot of things about my people. ![]() Here’s the essence of Parthenon in Solace’s own words: Solace has a history with Idris from all the way back in the war, when the Int was her responsibility to look after-pulled into active duty from cryosleep, she’s been sent to make Idris an offer, one he may not be able to refuse. The Parthenon’s one great disadvantage? They lack Intermediaries of their own, those capable of travelling outside the Throughways and into deep space at a faster-than-light speed. During the great war, all of humanity was held together by the common threat of the Architects forty years later, fractures between the two strands of humanity have widened to the point that tensions might give way to open war at the least provocation. For that very reason, they are feared by much of humanity, especially the Nativists and their extremist faction, the Betrayed. The nation of Parthenon is “composed of parthenogenetically grown women,” who are considered by their creator to be “an ideal version of humanity”. By the point the Vulture makes its discovery, the ship’s crew has picked up a new recruit-point of view character Solace, a Myrmidon Executor of the Partheni, the genetically engineered sisterhood of humanity, battle angels sworn to the defence of human space and the most militarily advanced strand of humankind. While this is an overt simplification of one main thread of the narrative, Tchaikovsky tells a far more intricate story. ![]() The discovery sets off a series of events that affect, as you’ll imagine, forces far outside the Vulture’s crew. The very same Idris, working now as navigator atop a shabby vessel by the name of the Vulture God, makes the deep-space discovery of a vessel that has gone through the same crystallization process as so many of humanity’s central worlds did, in that great war. Forty years have passed since Intermediary Idris and two of his “siblings” at last managed to make contact with one of the Architects and so buy humanity a reprieve. The first world targeted by these staggering intelligences is Earth and so Tchaikovksy’s future humanity is orphaned from its cradle, which has turned into little more than a confederation loosely held by multiple factions under the name “Hugh” (or Council of Human Interests) by the time the crux of the narrative picks up. These cosmic leviathans are utterly unaware of the uncountable lives snuffed out in the process of the transformation they induce. The Architects are “moon-sized entities that can reshape populated planets and ships” (as per the Glossary) into crystalline sculptures of staggering and repulsive beauty. Tchaikovsky’s ambitions for this series are made clear early on- Shards opens with a story of cosmic struggle against an enemy so vast, even humanity’s most advanced weaponry does no more than pinprick them. Shards of Earth is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s first bona fide attempt at a space opera, the opening to his Final Architecture trilogy, and one of the best science fiction books I’ve read this year.
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