Her arms ended at the elbows with a tuft of half-formed fingers, one leg stopped at the smooth stump of her knee, the other absent altogether. Diversity is actually also addressed explicitly – perhaps clunkily – in dialogue between Olli and Solace: Olli was born without limbs: The diversity of species all working together with mutual respect is a (somewhat utopian) staple of the genre, isn’t it? The found family, looking out for each other, loyal to each other even to death. Solace quickly – perhaps too quickly – comes to view herself as a part of the Vulture God’s crew.

Solace is sent to join them, to persuade Idris to come to the Partheni as an Intermediary because the surgery that made him capable of touching the mind of an Architect also allows him to navigate the mysterious unspace that permits interstellar travel, making him a valuable commodity. We have the Captain, Rollo Rostand, the drone specialist Olli Timo, the Hannilambra Kittering who rented out advertising space on screens affixed to his shell Medvik, a hiver and Kris Almier, a lawyer who is as proficient with a dueling blade as she is with precedent and statute. The crew of the Vulture God is that staple of science fiction: a rag tag crew of misfits who form a family of kind. It is a well constructed and messy world which we see primarily through the eyes of those on the outskirts of it: Idris has become the navigator of the Vulture God, a salvage scavenger ship for hire, and his viewpoint is that of the Spacers rather than colonials. The Architects disappear and without a common enemy, the unity of the human polyaspora is lost and inter-factional, inter-racial, inter-species tensions have grown. The battle is devastating but ultimately successful and both Idris and Solace survive as the narrative propels us fifty years into the future.īy narrative shenanigans, neither Solace nor Idris age over the time jump, but the world around them does. Solace is one of the Partheni, a race of warrior women created through parthenogenesis, who is given charge to protect Idris, one of the Intermediaries. They are armed with massive mass looms on the Partheni warships, as well as the first wave of the new psychically adapted Intermediary Program. We open the novel in medias res as the combined forces of a united humanity and its alien allies face-off against an architect approaching the bustling planet of Berlenhof, Earth having been the first victim of the Architects. Crablike Hannilambra who tend towards the acquisitive hivers, autonomous insect sized creations that create an intelligence and identity and sentience when they come together the Tothiat, a grafting between what appears to be a human with an insect and is all-but indestructible, healing like Wolverine the Essiel – space faring clams! And the moon sized Architects, crystalline beings who reshape and reform ships, people and inhabited planets – only inhabited planets – into twisted, aesthetically pleasing tombs, twisted and broken and dead, but beautiful. Shards of Earth launches us into an epic series, in which humanity has found its way into the stars and found itself amongst a range of other species. Science Fiction is not a genre I dip into often, but I generally do enjoy it when I do! There are quirky, heartwarming writers like Becky Chambers or the glorious weirdness that is Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb and even the lyricism of This Is How You Lose the Time War…

Shards of war review