Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by Orbit on August 3, 2021

Adrian Tchaikovsky built a detailed universe for Shards of Earth, the first book of the Final Architecture series. That universe is fundamental to the novel, but it never gets in the way of a multifaceted space opera that features creative aliens and appealing human characters.

A human diaspora led to the settlement of hundreds of worlds in the novel’s far future. As humans tend to do, they have divided themselves into factions. Most worlds colonized by humans belong to the Council of Human Interests, or Hugh. Some have followed the Essiel, an ancient alien race that has organized the Hegemony and promises protection from threats if its members will accept the Essiel as divine beings. While the Essiel generally leave species and individuals alone if they choose not to follow the Essiel, the humans who join the Essiel, being human, tend to become cultists.

The primary threat to humanity comes from inscrutable aliens called the Architects. The Architects destroy inhabited worlds. They’ve destroyed alien civilizations in the past and, a few decades before the novel begins, they turned their attention to human worlds, starting with Earth. Their ships appear out of nowhere and, using a technology that humans don’t understand, reshape planets by pulling at their cores and turning the planets inside out. They take a similar approach to the ships that attack them. The new contours of the reshaped planets and ships might be appreciated for their aesthetic value, although not by their dead inhabitants. Perhaps the destruction is a form of artistic creation, a theory that explains why humans refer to the aliens as Architects.

A group of women called the Parthenon represent a human faction outside of the Hugh. They reproduce parthenogenetically and are genetically engineered to be, as conceived by their founder, ideal representatives of humanity. The Partheni are fierce warriors but they are viewed with suspicion by humans who believe rumors that the Partheni kill male babies and want to form a superior race that will subjugate lesser humans. Whether their founder actually intended the Partheni to rule others was, at least for a time, a subject of some debate among the Partheni, but less authoritarian Partheni minds ultimately prevailed.

While the Parthenon fought alongside the Hugh against the Architects, a different breed of human provided the key to the war. A 15-year-old girl named Xavienne was able to reach into the mind of an Architect and turn its ship back. Humans tried to engineer that same ability into volunteers known as Intermediaries, killing most of them in the process. The most successful Int was Idris Telemmier. He teamed with a Partheni named Solace in the war’s most important battle.

The other primary defense against Architects are relics left on certain worlds by an ancient race known as the Originators. The Architects won’t go near those worlds. Unfortunately, the relics lose their power to deter Architects when they are transported elsewhere.

All of this is background to a story that takes place several decades after the Architects disappeared. By virtue of their engineering, Ints are able to pilot vessels in unspace. That makes them valuable even in the absence of the enemy Architects. While most humans lose their sanity (or at least their lunch) unless they sleep through journeys into unspace, Ints can withstand the discomfort. Telemmier nevertheless experiences barely suppressed horror based on his sense of a terrifying presence in unspace.

Telemmier is now piloting a salvage vessel called the Vulture God. Decades after they were last together, Solace is asked to recruit Telemmier to work for the Partheni. After proving her worth to the ship during a skirmish on an unwelcoming planet, she joins the crew so she’ll have the opportunity to make her pitch to Telemmier.

Apart from Telemmier and Solace, the novel’s primary characters are other crew members of the Vulture God. A shrewd lawyer named Kris, a factor (deal maker/accountant) named Kit, a drone specialist named Olli, and a search specialist named Medvig are the most memorable characters. Kit is Hammilambra, an alien species whose members resemble crabs. Medvig is a Hiver, a distributed intelligence that resides in cyborg insects that inhabit mechanical bodies. Olli was “born a stranger to her human body” and relies on mechanical devices for transportation (her favorite resembles an oversize scorpion). A Hiver archeologist named Trine becomes a de facto crew member when Solace needs his expertise to analyze some relics. The wormlike Castigar and symbionts called the Tothiat are among the other species that populate the universe.

The plot takes off when the Vulture God contracts to recover a missing ship. The crew discovers that the ship has been reshaped, suggesting that the Architects have returned. The crew encounters one obstacle after another when they try to bring the ship home. Various parties, including a group of Essiel gangsters and the human version of the CIA/KGB, want to seize the ship or its contents, kidnap Telemmier, or start a fight. As the reader might expect, the Architects do return, forcing a reluctant Telemmier to once again play hero. By the end, Telemmier learns something about the Architects and their mission that will undoubtedly set up the next book in the series.

In the grand tradition of science fiction, Telemmier also learns something about himself as he finds the courage and pluck to return to heroic conflict after embracing obscurity during decades of peace. He also finds that he missed Solace, having bonded with her in battle, although he doesn’t particularly trust her. Solace’s own conflict, between her loyalty to the sisterhood of Parthenon and her friends on the Vulture God, tests her in a way that will be familiar to science fiction fans.

Shards of Earth is built on a carefully conceived foundation that suggests an epic story, yet Tchaikovsky never lets the story get away from him. He balances the big picture with interpersonal conflicts, making it possible for the reader to relate to the characters, even if they aren’t the sort of cyborg insects who live next door. I wouldn’t say that the far future is so different from the present that it represents a brilliance of imagination, but the story is satisfying, the characters have distinct personalities, and the true nature of the Architects presents an intriguing question. I look forward to learning any answers Tchaikovsky decides to provide in the next novel.

RECOMMENDED

Light Chaser by Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell

Published by tor.com on August 24, 2021

Humanity has spread itself among the stars, but it has fallen short of its full potential. The message that Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell send in Light Chaser will be familiar to science fiction fans: humans need to be challenged or the human race becomes stagnant. Of course, stagnant humans can live pretty good lives — asking a replicator to make me a cheeseburger would be nicer than working all day so I can afford cheeseburgers — but the virtues of endeavor and competition (and even war) have always been preached like religious dogma by the giants of science fiction.

Hamilton and Powell marry the theme of stagnation to another popular theme: fear that Artificial Intelligence will do a disservice to the humans who depend upon it by making our lives too easy, perhaps enslaving us in the process. To sf writers, Alexa is a very naughty girl. In the far future of Light Chaser, AI controls worlds, assuring their stability but denying humans the resources they need to grow and achieve better lives.

The novel begins with Amahle and another person traveling to the home world of the Exalted. They are flying a strangelet into a star that will destroy all the worlds in the star’s system. The novel then backtracks to tell us why this is happening. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell us enough.

Amahle is a Light Chaser. She is essentially immortal. She is under contract to fly a circuit at near light speed every thousand years. She makes port at various planets, where she trades goods with selected families. In exchange for those goods, family members have agreed to wear memory collars, passing them from generation to generation over the next thousand years. When Amahle returns, she collects the collars and issues new ones. The memory collars store the memories of everyone who wears them. Amahle spends her flight time reviewing the memories on the collars, which I suppose is like watching a steady diet of particularly boring soap operas.

Amahle’s human brain has limited storage capacity, so she can’t remember much of her early years. As she reviews the memory collars, she encounters humans who have messages for her — although the messages all originate from one human who seems to have taken various guises over the years, apart from his identifying tattoo. Piecing together those messages helps Amahle remember that she was once married. Her husband has something important to tell her about the AI that runs her ship. Eventually the messages cause her to distrust all the AIs that are running the systems on every human world. Why that information must be provided in pieces over multiple collars is never entirely clear.

Light Chaser is relatively short, probably short enough to qualify as a novella. Perhaps its length accounts for its failure to develop its themes in full. The AI that controls humanity could be giving humans more resources and better lives. We’re told that it doesn’t do so because its purpose is to assure stability, but we aren’t told why better lives would create instability. Some of the worlds Amahle visits are modern but others are medieval. What’s the point of not allowing (or helping) medieval societies to advance? How does the AI manage to keep humans in a medieval state for millennia? The ultimate purpose of the AI is to deliver memory collars and their stories to the Exalted, but it isn’t clear why the Exalted want stories of stable societies. Wouldn’t stories of unstable societies be more interesting? Nor is it clear why thriving societies would necessarily be unstable. Some of the worlds have attained a future version of modernity without losing their stability. Why won’t the AI allow that on every world?

Hamilton and Powell leave too many questions unanswered, all for the sake of illustrating a well-worn sf mantra: competition is good, managing human life is bad, unstable societies lead to progress unless everyone dies. The Exalted are a plot device rather than an actual race. We know almost nothing about them, apart from their residence “in the null-folds of the Cosmos,” a term that has the vagueness of gibberish, and their desire to “increase the experience which enriched them, by feeding on human experience like vampires of the mind.” What, I wonder, is so interesting about mundane human lives that the Exalted are enriched by experiencing them? Why would they be less enriched if they did not manipulate the human perception of reality, so that humans live in a reality apart from the “original reality we encountered when our souls first emerged into it from our holm beyond.” More gibberish, at least from my admittedly limited perception of reality.  

Amanda’s experiences on the worlds she visits and the experiences of people whose memories she reviews demonstrate that the authors are capable of writing with warmth and feeling. Light Chaser is intriguing, but both authors are capable of telling better stories than this one. The clichés about trading stability for progress are too easy and the unanswered questions are too important to ignore. Light Chaser feels like a good idea that never evolved into the complex story that the idea merited.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Published by Del Rey on August 17, 2021

Velvet Was the Night is a story of Mexican noir. Set in the early 1970s, the novel takes as its background a CIA funded and Mexican government-supported effort to organize private citizens as shock troops (known as Hawks) to attack protesting students. The CIA wanted to suppress communism and the Mexican government wanted to suppress dissent. Those machinations cemented Mexico’s authoritarian oppression and laid the foundation for the Dirty War.

Maite is caught in the middle of that struggle. She isn’t political. She doesn’t feel she’s much of anything. Her days, as she sees them, are dull and meaningless. Her sister berates her for wasting her life. As she turns 30, Maite is a single, insecure woman who devours romance comics, wishing her life were filled with the love and drama she reads about.

Maite can’t afford to pay for her car repairs. She supplements her income as a secretary by looking after her neighbors’ pets when they are away. Maite’s only vice is her occasional theft of a small object from a neighbor’s apartment.

Maite has been feeding Leonara’s cat. She’s vexed that Leonara hasn’t returned from her trip. When Leonara finally calls Maite and asks her to bring the cat and a box to an address, Maite becomes even more annoyed when Leonara doesn’t appear. She decides to track down Leonara so she can get paid. Her quest leads her to a group of wannabe revolutionaries and brings her to the attention of the Hawks and the secret police.

The other protagonist, Elvis, is a Hawk. At 21, he is the right age to blend with and infiltrate student groups. He admires his boss, El Mago, and is more committed to following El Mago than to any political philosophy. Elvis doesn’t mind administering beatings to send a message, but he draws the line at beating women or killing anyone. He’d rather be doing something else with his life but he doesn’t know what else he is capable of doing.

The novel alternates chapters that follow either Elvis or Maite. Their paths intersect when El Mago assigns Elvis to follow Maite. El Mago wants to find some pictures that Leonara has hidden. He hopes that Maite will lead him to Leonara.

Maite and Elvis are linked in unexpected ways, particularly by their passion for music. Elvis is impressed by the record collection he discovers while snooping through Maite’s apartment. Elvis took his name from the obvious source, but he’s also a fan of Sinatra and American standards. Maite enjoys the Spanish versions of those songs. The government has closed singing cafés and banned American rock because it views dancing as a form of anarchy, but the government can’t stop Maite or Elvis from enjoying music.

As one would expect of authoritarians and revolutionaries, none of the characters trust each other. The revolutionaries correctly believe they have an informant in their midst. An agent of the secret police named Anaya is sure that his sources are all lying to him. The Hawks and the secret police share the goal of disrupting perceived communists but they share nothing else. A Russian KGB agent adds another level of intrigue to the story. A relative of Leonara seems to want her dead. Elvis becomes increasingly disillusioned as his friends die, particularly when he learns the identity of one of the killers.

For Elvis, the story is one of intellectual disenchantment and personal growth as he begins to realize that the Hawks and their methods pose a greater threat to Mexico than the harmless student protestors. For Maite, the story is one of romance followed by inevitable heartbreak followed by the unlikely possibility of a new romance. The protagonists’ stories are simple, but they are built on strong characterizations and on the novel’s complex noir setting.

RECOMMENDED

Bloodless by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on August 17, 2021

Bloodless gets off to a promising start by reimagining the D.B. Cooper airplane hijacking. Decades later (roughly in our present), a bloodless body is found in Savannah. Is a vampire roaming the streets of Savannah? It seems more likely to be the work of a particularly gruesome murderer, although sucking all the blood from a body is not an easy task. Aloysius Pendergast and his current partner, Armstrong Coldmoon, are diverted to Savannah to investigate. Pendergast’s ward, the mysterious Constance Greene, goes along for the ride. More bloodless corpses soon appear on the southern landscape, sometimes in a genuinely chilling scene.

Bloodless develops an interesting cast of characters, the kind of people who make satisfying suspects in a murder mystery, including an evil senator who is running for reelection, a documentarian who is filming a series about supernatural events, a scam artist who purports to capture digital images of spirits and demons, and an elderly lady with a collection of antique weapons who lives as a hermit in a hotel’s upper floors. Bloodless also delivers the spooky atmosphere that is almost a necessity in a story set in Savannah.

Some Pendergast novels have flirted with supernatural themes. I haven’t been taken with those stories. I prefer the stories that portray Pendergast as a modern version of Sherlock Holmes, complete with eccentricities that complement his deductive skills. For much of the novel, Bloodless seems like it could go in either direction — a supernatural force might be afoot, perhaps a vampire, or a murderer might be using superstition to mask his killings.

Unfortunately, Preston and Child take the story in a third direction, one that is more science fiction than horror. I don’t want to spoil it, but I will say [stop reading here if you don’t want to risk knowledge of a surprising plot point] that it involves a monster from another dimension. Now, the multiverse is a popular theme in science fiction novels, one that sf writers explore in interesting ways. As they have demonstrated in other novels, Preston and Child are not adept at science fiction. Their explanation for the sudden appearance of blood sucking monster in Savannah is just silly. (Hint: it involves turning a dial too far on a machine that makes no sense.)

The story crashes at the end. I was left wondering why it would be easier for one guy with a handgun to kill a monster in its own universe when it resists death in our universe after being shot with a bazooka, a Tommy gun (yes, seriously), and any number of bullets fired by Glock-wielding cops.

I was also left wondering about all the plot points that were set up in the novel’s first half. It seems like Preston and Child began to write one novel, couldn’t figure out how to end it, and decided to abandon it while writing an ending to a different novel.

I enjoyed the D.B. Cooper angle. I enjoyed the detailed setup. I admired the atmosphere and the careful construction of secondary characters. The authors add a touching scene at the end that’s almost redemptive. If the novel’s strengths hadn’t been counterbalanced by a preposterous conclusion, I would have been a happy reader. At best, I can recommend the first two-thirds of the novel and a brief chapter at the end. You might want to quit after the first two-thirds and make up your own ending if you want to get the most out of Bloodless.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Another Kind of Eden by James Lee Burke

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 17, 2021

Another Kind of Eden takes place when Aaron Holland Broussard is 26. Aaron has been to war, earned a degree, and written a novel. He describes himself as “a failed English instructor.” Aaron was a teenager when he appeared in The Jealous Kind, one of my favorite James Lee Burke novels.

As a post-war drifter, Aaron “learned quickly that the Other America was a complex culture held together by the poetry of Walt Whitman, the songs of Woody Guthrie, and the prose of Jack Kerouac.” Aaron spends the spring and summer of 1962 working on a dairy and produce farm in Colorado. The owner, Jude Lowry, is a decent man. Aaron is sufficiently decent to resist the advances made by Lowry’s wife.

Aaron works with Spud Caudill and Cotton Williams, two men who have his back when he’s attacked for driving a truck that has a union sticker. The Sheriff, Wade Benbow, briefly locks up Aaron despite his correct suspicion that the fight was started by Darrel Vickers, whose father Rueben is a well-connected rancher. Darrel is suspected of killing a little girl by locking her in a refrigerator when he was still a child.

Aaron learns the identity of his attacker from Jo Anne McGuffy, a waitress who paints macabre scenes in her spare time. Her paintings are based on the Ludlow Massacre, a mass killing of striking workers perpetrated by anti-labor militia members in 1914. Over the course of the novel, Aaron falls in love with Jo Anne, although she’s sleeping with her professor, Henri Devos, and if Darrel is worthy of belief, has been his lover, as well.

The plot involves threats to various people, mostly women, including Jo Anne and some women on a hippie bus who are being pimped out. They hippies “were the detritus of a Puritan culture, one that made mincemeat of its children and left them marked from head to foot with every violation of the body that can be imposed on a human being: state homes, sexual molestation, sodomy, gang bangs, reformatory tats, fundamentalist churches . . . . Their hallmark was the solemnity, anger, and pain in their eyes.” Spud is a suspect when a hooker turns up dead (because Spud works so that he can afford to visit hookers), but Aaron has seen no evil in Spud’s heart. Another woman, one of the hippies on the bus, is hospitalized for reasons that nobody wants to discuss.

Aaron saw more than his share of evil during the Korean War; he blames himself for a loss of an MIA friend. Benbow saw his share when he liberated a subcamp of Dachau. The notion of evil as a force is a popular theme among thriller writers who try to understand and explain the human condition. Burke has turned to that theme again and again, sometimes envisioning evil as the offspring of the supernatural. There are supernatural elements in Another Kind of Eden, including a war buddy who appears from the dead and creates a miracle at a delicate moment. Apparent demons and glimpses of ghosts, perhaps real and perhaps not, pop up near the story’s end. While I could have done without the supernatural, I always appreciate Burke’s effort to comprehend the absence of compassion and decency in human behavior.

Aaron learns something about himself as he struggles against evil men. He comes to accept that “the Holland legacy of violence and mayhem had always lived inside me,” but the acceptance of his inner demons gives him peace without encouraging him to embrace the violence. He instead embraces the inevitability of death: “As Stephen Crane wrote at the close of The Red Badge of Courage, the great death was only the great death, not to be sought, not to be feared, but treated as an inconsequential player in the human comedy.”

The supernatural elements put me off a bit, making me rank Another Kind of Eden below Burke’s best work. But novels that are not Burke’s best are better novels than most crime writers can compose. Burke’s prose style and the depth of his thought make him one of my three favorite writers of crime fiction and one of the best writers of American fiction in or outside of any genre.

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