★★★☆☆ A Tchaikovsky miss

Shards of Earth

Adrian Tchaikovsky

I am not a worshipper of Adrian Tchaikovsky, but I respect him enough to give almost any new thing he writes a chance. He's writing some of the best hard science fiction being published today, for instance Children of Time. He also writes some of the best thoughtful fantasy being published, like And Put Away Childish Things. He has, in my opinion, one major fault, and that is his tendency to degenerate into juvenile dorm-room philosophizing, for instance Children of Memory and Service Model. Shards of Earth is none of those things. I give Tchaikovsky credit for one major thing: he keeps experimenting, he keeps trying new stuff. Shards of Earth is, in my opinion, an experiment that didn't work out well.

I picked up Shards of Earth because The Final Architecture is a finalist for a 2024 Best Series Hugo Award. I will not be reading any more of the series. It is emphatically not hard science fiction. It belongs more to the Wizards in Space subgenre, in which wizards do magic with their minds. (The wizards are called Intermediaries, and of course they don't describe what they do as magic.) There is faster-than-light travel which is clearly there purely for narrative convenience. It is of the hyperspace kind that has been around at least since Isaac Asimov used it to build a galactic empire. As usual it has been tarted up with convenient plot devices. In Shards of Earth it is called unspace and the Intermediaries can feel it with their minds. Most of the characters are human, but there are several types of aliens. As usual, the aliens don't feel all that different from humans.

And, instead of the hyperintellectualism I expect of Tchaikovsky, what we have here is a nonstop action epic. There is battle after battle, with imaginary technologies and weird alien superpowers. Individually the battles are fairly exciting, but this is Too Much Of A Good Thing. There are hints toward the end of Tchaikovsky-esque dorm-room philosophical conflicts to come in remaining books of the series, but I'll give it a pass.

These are of course very personal reactions. I can easily see how Shards of Earth might hit the spot exactly for some other readers. But not, alas, for me.

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