Eyes of the Void

Book 2 of the Final Architecture series

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This book is something like 85% action! It was one confrontation after the next, and in between, the set-up for the next confrontation.

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Like the first book in the trilogy, this one would have benefited from an editor tightening up some passages, and perhaps a few more clarifying sentences related to the spaces in which fight scenes happened, but overall a fun read.

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The room was stacked with metal and plastic crates, the sort for small cargo, or that spacers used to carry their worldly goods from ship to ship. Some were open, some empty, others overflowing with the sort of old tech that never got thrown away out here on the edge of human reach. It was something that sparked contempt in a lot of Partheni, the hoarding, pack-rat mentality of Colonials.

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Except Solace had seen their technicians – and spacers were all technicians to one degree or another – make gold out of dross in situations a Partheni tech would have given over as impossible. Her people had no idea, honestly, just how much invention necessity could be mother of.

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In this one, one of the secondary species begins becoming more of a key player in the geo-political machinations of the galaxy, and what is great about it, beyond the fact that this species was created by humans and then it petitioned to be acknowledged as a sovereign species, is that it is referred to as ‘they’, not 'it'.

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The Hivers are a species of cyber-insects that animate an autonomous form (of various shapes), and when their assigned job has been completed they rejoin the Aggregate. This species is one of several that the imaginative author has created that makes the series so enjoyable.

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‘It’s a coup,’ he said. A very small coup, admittedly. A trial run, proof of concept perhaps.

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He was thinking of what Colvari had found in those stolen documents, the meeting transcript where the desirability of a shooting war against the Parthenon had been mooted so complacently.

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As a theory: only if humanity was going to rely on arks to survive a theoretical Architect incursion. But what if you went ahead to start building those arks, let’s say? What if you devoted all those resources to that fall-back? You’d get invested, wouldn’t you. You’d start to see it as something other than a last resort. Especially if that would make you King of the Ark People rather than just one magnate amongst many.

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The Greater Good morphed into self-interest so easily; human history was full of it.

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Another thing this author is good at is the naming of things. The Parthenon is a race of lab-grown, space-faring, female warriors; Gianduja is the name of a woman who serves hot chocolate; Ahab is the name of an individual who is captaining an adventure into unspace; Ceres is the name of the Partheni garden-ship. The names of the Essiel are fantastic too! The attention Mr. Tchaikovsky puts into naming things goes a long way.

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A castle from the worst sort of fairytales, spearing up into the sky, its twisted spires erupting from the glassy black rock. She looked up, following their lines, and almost fell again. The sky was full of those monstrous hell-flowers, great glass-plate petals and leaves overlapping and poisoning the light so that it rained on her like visible corruption.

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I read it on the kindle, so I wasn’t able to experience the heft of this book, but I’ve looked it up and found that this book is 600 pages. Yes, that makes sense. It really did feel like two books in one. Probably because of the non-stop action.

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Great stuff.

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