#SHARDS OF WAR REVIEW FREE#

That old bond is rekindled as Solace tries to find a place within the ever suspicious crew of the Vulture God. Solace and Idris have an interesting back story that dates to the time of the Architects War when Solace helped bring Idris through the terrible toll that his work as an Int confronting the vast minds of Architects took on him. She has an assignment to lure Idris into the service of her military society that has an uneasy alliance with the human worlds. Yet it is well handled and consistently interesting as the story settles into its focus on Idris and a Partheni agent named Solace. To keep all this straight, Shards of Earth includes an extensive glossary with lists of worlds, characters, species and a timeline tracing the major events of space settlement and the Architects war down to the moment the story begins.Īll of this takes a lot of descriptive background, and the narrative has something of a stop-start feel as one new world and species after another are introduced. The Partheni are a race of vat-grown women that comprise an especially powerful military force, and the Essiel, giant clam-like creatures who have managed to build an alien empire including many human subjects who worship them as divine. The resultant combination produces immensely strong symbionts with incredible powers of healing and resilience that make them extremely hard to knock out of action. There are the Hannilambra, a crab-like species especially good at commercial intricacies, and the Tothiat, a symbiotic combination of a lobster-like entity that attaches to humans and other species. There are the Hivers, hive mind insects that make themselves more relatable to humans by concealing their swarms within almost humanoid frames.

#SHARDS OF WAR REVIEW FREE#

He describes multiple worlds including several settled by humans of their Polyaspora and many dominated by strange species that give free play to the author’s imagination. Shards of Earth is the first volume of a series, and Tchaikovsky takes his time to create a complex universe. How can the crew deal with this carved-up graveyard ship without setting off alarms around the universe that the Architects have returned? It’s not long before the Vulture God and its crew are pursued by an assortment of powerful and interestingly villainous members of multiple species, all determined to seize a mysterious set of objects aboard the destroyed vessel. The ship Oumaru bears all the marks of destruction by the Architects. When searching for a lost ship to salvage, they make a terrible discovery. No one is sure.ĭecades after their disappearance, Idris is part of a salvage crew on the Vulture God with a wonderfully eclectic mix of different species and often abrasive yet witty personalities who have formed their own style of family. Somehow that ability caused these enemies to vanish, perhaps because they simply recognized humans as having abilities resembling their own.

Idris found that he and others like him, if they were lucky enough to survive their re-engineering, had a unique ability to perceive the mysterious patterns that drew the Architects to certain planets and even to enter their minds. The distinctive peeled-apart remains in complex designs inspired the name, but nothing else is known about them.

Their moon-size ships appear suddenly over planets which are then turned inside out, destroying all inhabitants.

Shards of war review