Lords of Uncreation (The Final Architecture, 3)

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This is the third book in a series, and though the review will be spoiler-free for this title, it will definitely include spoilers for the earlier books: Shards of Earthand Eyes of the Void. The first 3/4 of this felt overlong, revolving as it did around the infighting and conflicts between and among the myriad human and alien factions. Here everything is fleshed out and written in a way where it's easier to grasp as pieces of the story start getting resolved.

Their ways of dealing with the world were addressed for both of them but because of the repetitive nature of the writing, and because I found those ways annoying or frustrating depending on who’s pov it was, I found myself not fully engaged or satisfied with their journey. That's the littlest bit of grit in the machine, though; more often we get arresting images such as the robotic limbs "all spread out like a cheering crowd at a praying mantis convention", or the wry/despairing and deeply relatable line "Attempts at damage diagnostics are being hampered by damage to the damage diagnostic systems.

A. Corey, noting that both works contained "space operatics, down-and-dirty noir and intrigue elements, band-of-comrades adventure, gothic spookiness, alien weirdness, special-effects-go-boom sequences, and mysteries that could well remain mysterious when all is finally wrapped up. But the superfluous bunny-trails, the overly-frequent and unnecessary shoot-'em-up scenes, the constant conniving between factions with no resolutions, and the repeated, identical forays into Idris' weaknesses and failings (as well as the entire swaths of hand-wavium, metaphysical blather about the nature of unspace) make this feel like a nine-hour long Marvel Comics movie.

I had to re-listen to the last three chapters, because I had run out of steam at the end and reaching the end I realized that I hadn‘t retained any of it, including the grand finale. Suite directe de Eyes of the Void, je ne parlerai pas plus du scénario pour ne pas spoiler, comme j’ai un souvenir assez nébuleux du deuxième mais juste … Wow. Closing the covers of my hardcover edition and putting the book back on its shelf had me sigh contently.I don’t think theorycrafters will necessarily be surprised by most of them, but for me the answers are never quite as important as how those answers resonate with the characters journeys, and in this case it all fits together immensely well. Then he turned directly to SFF as an amazing medium for re-envisioning the mind and the worlds it creates.

For example, conflict between Hugh and the Parthenon is examined through the characters of Idris and Solace. But overall I enjoyed the way everything was wrapped up, and I recommend the entire Final Architecture series for anyone looking for some epic space opera. Easy to lose yourself in the sheer wonder of the author's inventiveness and imagination, so you become fully immersed in it.It is this human contact that enables him to function despite his total immersion in his mental wanderings. Perhaps it is time for the author to commission an artist or illustrator to sit down and put all the characters within this superb trilogy in print in one form or another. And it showed the ways in which life and conflict carries on even outside the bubble of those trying to save the world, which isn’t always something I see in these kinds of stories. But still, even a slightly sub par book for Tchaikovsky is still head and shoulders above most other competitors in the field.

The second book featured tense action scenes, a conspiracy by a human faction and an installation on a hellish planet with weird alien life. The crew, at this point, consists of one of the most interesting point of view characters, the irreverent Olli, a human born without many limbs who gets around with the aid of a complex walker; Junior, an Ogdru or enormous fish-like entity living in a tank of water who has uncanny navigational abilities; and Kittering or Kit, a Hannilambra or crab-like creature handling trade for salvage items.In a review for Locus, Russell Letson praised Shards of Earth as an example of "recombinant sci-fi" because it combines several large ideas into a "busy, complicated, surprising [concoction].