Shards of Earth is a space opera that takes place in a future where the Earth has been destroyed. This is not a spoiler, as it is in the prologue. The Architects have come, giant moon sized entities who do not respond to our communication attempts, and they destroy settled worlds while leaving empty worlds alone. There is a rich cast of characters including heroes from that war, merchants, bureaucrats, religious cult leaders, several alien species and even robot collective creatures. The conflict of human sects against each other is just part of the tapestry.
I had the pleasure of listening to Adrian Tchaikovsky read the prologue of this book at the Flight of Foundry convention a few months back and I knew I had to read this book. It had just been released… in England… so I was going to have to wait until August to start. Well, I couldn’t wait that long. Fortunately for me, I have a friend who lives in England and she not only purchased a copy for me, but made sure it was a signed copy, and then sent it to me so I could read it before it was officially released in the US. And I’m really glad I did. This is one of the books that I am going to use as a model for the tone of my WIP.
Tchaikovsky is an eloquent writer. The details he lays down, the careful sentences, the craft is very good. The world building in this book is fantastic. Humans have learned to travel through unspace, a layer of reality “below” what we experience day to day. The story is told in third person past tense, and follows approximately 5 POV characters, including two who were present at the end of the last war against the alien Architects, who destroyed the earth about 80 years ago.
The book has a glossary of terms, including the major characters, ships, planets, and a short history, which I found very useful as I started reading the first third of the book. Interestingly, almost all of the history was eventually included in the main text as flashback scenes or narrative sections. I enjoyed reading about the prior events in more narrative form after reading about them in the history section.
The characters are lovely and feel very real. I spent a while in the first 50-100 pages making sure that i really knew who each character was… and I was quite surprised when some of these characters started dying off. Nothing was gratuitous, and the point was made multiple times about how dangerous space is, even when not at war.
There is political intrigue among different types of humans, different alien races, and you always get a deep sense of a complex and real world, but the story is tightly focused on the adventures of the main crew of about 10 characters, and the foreboding that the Architects may be back to continue their destruction of humanity.
This book is apparently the first in a series, and I really can’t wait for the rest. This was very good science fiction.