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2020 is infamous for many things. It probably won’t go down in history as being the year in which I discovered the work of Adrian Tchaikovsky, but in a year filled with darkness, his novels were pinpricks of light that kept me going. They also make handy house bricks. I’m not sure who the most prolific SFF writer is right now, but Tchaikovsky must be up there. He surely pays his word counter an awful lot of overtime. Of course, anybody who has watched Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films will know that longer doesn’t necessarily make for better. What is most impressive about Tchaikovsky’s work is not that there’s so much of it, but that the quality is so high. He’s back again this month with another sci-fi epic, Shards of Earth.
What Is Shards of Earth?
Shards of Earth is the start of a new science fiction series, a classic space opera featuring a bashed-up ship and a crew of plucky misfits. The novel opens with the scene of a battle. Earth and many other colonized planets have been destroyed. The mysterious “Architects,” in their huge ships of crystal, twist the fabric of planets, rearranging them into new peculiar, artful, constructions. Their reasons for doing so are unfathomable.
The opening prologue shows how humanity brings to bear a new weapon in their fight against the Architects…
