Cannonball Read 15

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530 pages and I wasn’t ready for it to be over

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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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 […]

back in the spider saddle again~

Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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I am really digging these books and how they expand the universe Tchaikovsky has created one step at a time, but realistically. Look not at how long it took me to read this (that’s a function of work, not desire). Perhaps do read this one soon after reading the prior book–I can see how you’d benefit from remembering some of the details from the prior, or how not remembering the prior book would make this one less rich. There’s the same sort of beats–similar to […]

detailed ‘heavy’ sci-fi at its finest

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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This is definitely another off the long White Whale list, as I think I’ve checked it out from the library a number of times before finally cracking it open this time around. Best “you’d like this if you liked” that I can give is likely Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. What an excellent, well thought out sci-fi novel—entirely standalone, if you want to, but with additional installments afterwards that expand on the themes here. The concept at the heart is directed evolution, and how it […]

“What a clever, doomed money I am.”

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Do you remember Starship Troopers? That perfect 1997 classic about a militaristic future where earth has encountered an alien species so foreign that war is the only viable path forward? And did you, like me, wish you got to learn more about the bugs? This is that book. It’s like Star Trek: Deep Space 9 on whatever is more intense than steroids. This is Asimov Foundation series on super alien steroids. I *need* you to read it, and then I *need* you to come back […]

Turning planets into origami

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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CBR14 Bingo: Cold (the majority of this novel is set in spaaace, which is famously very cold) It would also work for Star and Series.  Official book description: Idris has neither aged nor slept since they remade his mind in the war. And one of humanity’s heroes now scrapes by on a freelance salvage vessel, to avoid the attention of greater powers. Eighty years ago, Earth was destroyed by an alien enemy. Many escaped, but millions more died. So mankind created enhanced humans ­such as Idris – […]

“I should just follow you clowns around…Find all the trouble in the galaxy that way…”

Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Things are not going well when the second book in The Final Architecture series, Eyes of the Void, opens. In Shards of Earth, we learned the Architects were themselves slaves, forced to destroy worlds. But the contact Idris Telemer made with the Architect isn’t stopping the destruction of planets and ships. Idris is with the Partheni, trying to find a strain of the clones that can be made into Intermediaries without the coercion and the high death rate in the Hugh (Council of Humans) program. […]



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