Review | Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Source: personal purchase. This is a review of my reading experience.

Shards of Earth is the first book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Final Architecture series.

The Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author of Children of Time brings us an extraordinary space opera about humanity on the brink of extinction, and how one man's discovery will save or destroy us all.

The war is over. Its heroes forgotten. Until one chance discovery . . .

Idris has neither aged nor slept since they remade him in the war. And one of humanity's heroes now scrapes by on a freelance salvage vessel, to avoid the attention of greater powers.

After earth was destroyed, mankind created a fighting elite to save their species, enhanced humans such as Idris. In the silence of space they could communicate, mind-to-mind, with the enemy. Then their alien aggressors, the Architects, simply disappeared—and Idris and his kind became obsolete.

Now, fifty years later, Idris and his crew have discovered something strange abandoned in space. It's clearly the work of the Architects—but are they returning? And if so, why? Hunted by gangsters, cults and governments, Idris and his crew race across the galaxy hunting for answers. For they now possess something of incalculable value, that many would kill to obtain.

Do you ever like a book and have nothing to say about it? My book club read Shards of Earth as our February book selection. We had book club today, and no one really had anything to say. The few of us that showed up and read it liked it (which was a little surprising to be honest), but we struggled to find things to talk about.

I annotate when I'm reading and I had a lot of tabs in this book, but I think pretty much every one of them dealt with unspace and the Architects. For me, unspace and the Architects were everything in this book. I feel like either my mind kind of glossed over everything else or it was just too much for me to grasp right now (highly possible). There were a lot of characters and politics and places.

So - I enjoyed parts of this book very much, but it's also not a favorite of mine outside of the fact that this book gave me the wonderful creeps and it's not even a horror book. I'm starting to realize how many frightening things are in scifi books. I need to start reading more each year than I normally do.

Having read Children of Time, I really thought Shards of Earth would stand on its own outside of the series its in, but that was not the case. The way it ended made it feel like this book was really just the beginning. At 500+ pages, that's a chunky beginning. But I'll be reading more! I need to know more about the Architects and what is going to happen.

I recommend Shards of Earth but not as a first Tchaikovsky book. Read some of his other stuff first so you will trust him enough to read through this one.

3/5 stars
⭐⭐⭐★★

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