Review of Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Eventually when you read enough “Earth is destroyed by a gigantic implacable space foe” stories you start to get bored of them. I was worried this would be the case with Shards of Earth despite the runway Tchaikovsky has built with the other novels of his that I’ve read. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book feels like a very refreshing take on this subgenre of space opera.

Idris is an Intermediary, or Int. Carefully altered through gene splicing and surgery, he and his colleagues were supposed to stop a one-sided war by reaching out to the unreachable. They failed. Or succeeded. It’s really unclear. Fast-forward nearly eighty years, and humanity has finally started to breathe and expand again despite Earth being no more. Idris himself, unique among that first cohort of Ints, has not aged. He’s living a life on the fringe, eking out a low-key existence. Meanwhile, Solace, a genetically engineered supersoldier from his past, comes back stronger than a nineties trend, on a mission from her superiors to … acquire Idris for his talents. She’s hoping he will come willingly, because she cares enough about him that she doesn’t want to make him come with her. Fortunately, or unfortunately, interstellar hijinks ensue, throwing Idris and Solace together with a band of unlikely siblings, if you will, and it is up to them to save the galaxy!

OK, I am being glib. But the brilliance here is how Tchaikovsky uses a lot of tired tropes but with a fresh coat of paint and some really good writing. You have your ragtag band of misfits and their incorrigible captain. You have your supersoldier with a heart of gold. You have your mutant with unspecified abilities and an invevitable nosebleed as he pushes those abilities to the very edge.

Tchaikovsky’s characterization is very deft. Solace and Idris, as the two viewpoint characters for the book’s limited third-person narration, benefit the most. Yet even the supporting cast gets a good amount of development. Some of it, like Olli’s enmity towards Solace, is very predictable (but also feels very realistic and sympathetic). But I love, for example, how Solace starts the book as this supersoldier raised in a very sterile culture who nevertheless has already learned lessons in flexibility, etc. In this way, the book doesn’t become about her journey to melt her ice-cold exterior but rather it’s about her learning to work as part of a team that is very different from what she is used to among the Parthenon, and her reconnecting with Idris. Ironically, Idris himself might be the most inscrutable character and the one who changes the least—honestly, he throws tantrums a few times and can be rather annoying.

Tchaikovsky’s exposition, in contrast, can feel clunky at times. It’s easy enough to overlook because he’s such a smooth writer, and he corrals it into specific parts of the book. I don’t mind a good infodump, so it doesn’t bother me. Also, it’s more about the sociopolitical side of things than the science side—he doesn’t spend much time trying to justify his handwavium, other than some, you know, handwaving as he mumbles “gravitic” and “brachator.” This book would make a great TV series because all the technology could be turned into cool special effects with a minimum of technobabble and everyone would be happy.

At the centre of it all, the real novum here, is Tchaikovsky’s concept of unspace (not to be confused with hyperspace, subspace, innerspace, underspace, etc.) and the possibility that we can somehow tweak our brains to perceive and access it, then fly spaceships through it. Idris’s connection to unspace, and his related ability to interface with the Architects, is key. Given what we learn about the Architects’ intentions herein, I am curious about what happens in the next book—I really hope the explanation isn’t another rehash of the Inhibitors like the Cutters from Future’s Edge, because I don’t think I could take that disappointment a second time.

But really, I was here because I stan Solace. I think she’s cool, for reasons noted above, and I like how her relationship with Idris is ambiguously queerplatonic and has a lot of room for different interpretations depending on what you as the reader want to bring to it.

In any event, Shards of Earth is a good space opera. It isn’t as philosophically deep as Tchaikovsky’s other space opera series, yet for what it is worth, I think I liked this better: the characters are better developed and more fun, and the story is richer.