Adrian’s stuff is so dense and layered, it’s hard to do a recap/overview. SO MUCH happens, and it’s all smart and dramatic and amazing! The world-building is so cool, the root-for-able characters and interesting plot are almost a bonus.
Okay, enough gushing. The very very nutshell version: 40 years ago, ginormous alien ships (if you made a drinking game out of every time they’re described as ‘moon-sized,’ you’d be a puddle by the end) showed up and started making beautiful and deadly sculptures out of every planet, ship, and space station they found. Earth’s refugees fled to their various colonies and allies, although the Architects were unmaking alien worlds as well. All sentient life banded together to fight the Architects, but these planet-killing aliens were so big and so, well, alien that they didn’t even seem to recognize that they were killing people. They were unstoppable until some very risky and inhumane brain experiments turned a handful of humans into Intermediaries, who were able to project their thoughts into space enough to get the Architects’ attention, and they went away.
Decades after this one-sided war, one of the last Intermediaries, Idris, is a pilot with a small ragamuffin crew, beloved of sci-fi stories everywhere. Solace, a genetically engineered warrior who has been on ice since the war, is thawed out and put to work. These two (and the absolutely marvelous members of Idris’s crew) end up facing off against aliens, bureaucrats, gangsters, opposing factions of humanity, and the ever-looming threat of, “What if the Architects come back?”
This is just a fraction of plot, and it’s only the first book! Love it, love him; can’t wait to read the next one, and the third Children of Time book. If you’ve never read Tchaikovsky, start with Children of Time. So good!
