Most reasons to be cheerful may still be on hold, but this is already the third new Adrian Tchaikovsky book 2021 has brought me* and it's exactly the space opera hit I needed. It's set decades after the destruction of Earth by the moon-sized, unknowable alien Architects – think Galactus if, instead of being peckish, he was bent on turning planets into objets d'art. Also, they have to be inhabited, and even the survivors admit a certain intent and beauty to the results. First realisation: at present, I can't read ends of the world that are as shabby and local as the real one, so John Crowley's Ka is staying firmly on the shelf, unread, and I didn't even bother requesting the new Valente or Vandermeer. But it turns out this sort of big, alien, bang rather than a whimper sort of doomsday is absolutely fine. Humanity already had space colonies at the time, too, so it's not even an evacuation from scratch a la Seveneves, though billions were still lost. Ultimately, we managed to drive off the Architects, though still nobody is entirely sure how, only that the surgically and chemically altered humans made into space navigators known as Intermediaries were key. A couple of generations along, as has been known to happen in the aftermath of a victory, the various human and post-human factions exist in a state of cold war, where exactly the resources it would make sense to share in case the Architects return are also the ones they might turn on each other. So the authorities of the human colonies as a whole – known, wonderfully, as 'Hugh' – are looking sceptically at the Partheni, all-female vat-grown warrior 'Angels Of Punching You In The Face', "beautiful and deadly like highly polished knives", who served as humanity's shield in the war, but are now feared to have sinister designs on the rest of the species, with its genetic flaws and its men...and as for the distributed consciousness of the Hivers, well. Lurking behind all this, shifting the Overton window in the very worst ways, are the Nativists and their stab-in-the-back myths about how old-fashioned humanity could have won more, or better, or something – and while analogous Trump/Brexit elements have cropped up in a lot of recent Tchaikovsky, these wretches work a lot better than most of their predecessors, precisely because the parallel isn't as overly-exact as it was in Bear Head or Doors Of Eden.

And of course, because this is space opera, there are aliens too – although because it's smart space opera, they have factions within their races too, rather than each standing as monolithic foreigner-substitutes. They are also very alien, especially the Hegemony, giant shellfish who administer a sort of cult/empire hybrid whose worlds have a mysterious invulnerability to the predation of the Architects. Of them all, though, I was most intrigued by Ash, the last survivor of a planet destroyed long before Earth, who kicks off the plot and then vanishes in a way suggesting a significant role in the remainder of the trilogy. Ash's harbinger role deepened the Galactus vibes by reminding me of Ultimate Vision – though also of the single escapees the Mongols would permit when they destroyed a city. In some ways, though, the Architects are probably more of a Lovecraftian vision, not in the sense of being a direct steal of his Old Ones with their tentacles and consonants, but by finding another route to his underlying point, the way the universe is full of things that will destroy us not out of malice, but simply because we don't register to them as worthy of note. This sense only deepens as we learn more about the mysterious Originators whose relics litter the galaxy, or the sense of being watched that lurks for those unlucky enough to be awake on the unspace jumps between worlds. Unspace being one of many times – see also the way that space combat and shielding here may still be cheating in terms of actual physics, but at least do so in novel and interesting ways – that Tchaikovsky is clearly running through a space opera checklist, but getting away with it. I kept getting echoes of recent (or at least they seem that way to me, because I am old) exercises in the subgenre, like Banks' Algebraist or Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep, and also of the current flagbearer for the stage where interplanetary SF is just about to evolve into space opera, The Expanse. After all, the leads here mostly represent one rag-tag crew with interesting pasts, accidentally in possession of a Macguffin way above their pay grade, who thus find themselves pursued by an awful lot of bigger, more dangerous players, often in such a way that shit is kicking off on at least three levels simultaneously. And yet, just as he normally does, Tchaikovsky gets away with any similarities by being good enough that it feels like making it new, rather than a hollow exercise in emulation. Some of that is simple pizzazz; some of it's the degree of thought put into the various characters and worlds and species; at times it's down to detail as fine as the phrasemaking, as when two twinkly old gents have an 'avuncle-off'.

Of course it still has its unavoidable Event resonances, right down to humanity now dating time simply in Before and After, or haunted by memories of all that's been lost. Worse, the spine of the story is the underlying horror of people slowly building new lives for themselves once the crisis is over, then suddenly having to deal with the nightmarish possibility of its return – something I suspect is going to come back to me whenever the whispers of the next pandemic start mounting. But for all that, the carnage, the occasional hideously detailed bits of gore, the abiding impression right now is of a page-turning (or in my case, screen-flicking) romp, which very much hit the spot.

*Obviously that's not all he's published; what kind of sluggard do you take him for? There was a fourth too, but it's the sequel to one I've not read.

(Netgalley ARC)

My only complaint about this book is a lack of space faring spiders and octopi 😉

Yet another inventive, creative and enthralling book from this author, i alway enjoy reading his books and always buy them in audiobook when available and I will be doing so with one soon as possible