Lords of Uncreation

Book 3 of The Final Architecture

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The final book of the trilogy, this one goes places we couldn’t have foreseen. The author has a great imagination that doesn’t back down from a challenging plot.

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They had Trine there too, the Hiver unit with the holographic face who’d been a big-shot Originator scholar since the war, supposedly. Trine sat on Olli’s other side and talked, and at least they were engaging enough, even though they only really talked about themself. Their phantom face twinkled and smiled, and the battery of arms set into their cylindrical body tore apart every morsel placed in front of them and fed it to the colony of cyborg roaches that lived inside them. Olli was fine with that, because Hivers were good people as far as she was concerned.

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In the second book, the scale of the escapade grows 10x when the Eye is uncovered and we realize the story isn’t about a little space war amongst various factions of humans.

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In the third book, the story grows 100x when we realize that it isn’t about humans against the Architects. All throughout the third book, the tension grows as time seems to always be running out, the bad guys keep showing up, the ship is always on the verge of falling to pieces, and war always feels imminent.

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The God must have hit the real around then, and moments later everyone in the Machine room would have heard the alarms telling them that Idris was dying again. Up to his old tricks, the mischievous scamp. Damn fool Idris was trying for suicide-by-universe one more time.

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They must have pulled all the plugs and hauled him from the Machine. Solace, Kris, Jaine and Andecka, as well as the handful of Hivers still with them. They’d have put him through the wringer to get his essential organs working again, which had just packed it in and handed in their notice, effective immediately.

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Reinflating his lungs, manually working the musculature of his heart, and the brain . . . All they could do was wait, really. Wait over that vacant lump of greasy grey, until suddenly all his electrical activity came back. Because that was how it sometimes went, with Ints.

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There are some really great twists in this one, with a solider being the only person who could hold off a group of intelligences keen on breaking her down with pride or fear. Since the solider knows her place, she can’t be broken by ego-based threats. Also very clever is how the most acerbic personality in the book becomes, in the end, a fabulously wealthy demi-god gangster. So good.

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Idris, elegant Kris, the dry humour of Kit’s translator, Olli who was never going to like her much but that was fine too. Rollo Rostand, who was dead but who’d christened her gun and been a weird kind of father figure for a brief span, to a woman who neither had nor needed one. Tact, who’d died for a razor-sharp vision of what her people should be. Mercy, likewise.

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Solace just hunkered down, for all of them, and let the philosophical assault slant off her shoulders, and shot. Again, she understood the shooting accomplished nothing, what with the gun not being real. But the holding was all, and sometimes a finger on the trigger was what you needed to give you even the illusion of control.

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Besides, and despite, all their aeons-old wisdom and power, they were only attacking on three sides, and that told her that the enemy desperately needed her to take the fourth side and run away.

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In these books, every race has an arc, each character gets their time in the spotlight, and the plot just keeps going. It’s a true space opera whose author deserves the awards he's been given for these books. They are a humorous, rollicking science-fiction adventure.

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Totally recommended!

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