Everything Is Better With Dragons

Summary

From Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Lords of Uncreation is the final high-octane instalment in the Final Architecture space opera trilogy.

He’s found a way to end their war, but will humanity survive to see it?

Idris Telemmier has uncovered a secret that changes everything – the Architects’ greatest weakness. A shadowy Cartel scrambles to turn his discovery into a weapon against these alien destroyers of worlds. But between them and victory stands self-interest. The galaxy’s great powers would rather pursue their own agendas than stand together against this shared terror.

Human and inhuman interests wrestle to control Idris’ discovery, as the galaxy erupts into a mutually destructive and self-defeating war. The other great obstacle to striking against their alien threat is Idris himself. He knows that the Architects, despite their power, are merely tools of a higher intelligence.

Deep within unspace, where time moves differently, and reality isn’t quite what it seems, their masters are the true threat. Masters who are just becoming aware of humanity’s daring – and taking steps to exterminate this annoyance forever.

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My Review

I’ve read or listened to quite a few of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s books in the last few years. I’m reading one currently, and I’ve just finished listening to this book. I’ve met Adrian a couple of times at FantasyCon; he’s from Lincolnshire and got his honorary Doctorate in January 2019, at the same ceremony I received my Masters at Lincoln. He’s a bit of a weirdo, but not a bad one. His son is autistic (some people I know who grew up with Mr Tchaikovsky have speculated that he’s ADHD but I don’t know), and he tries to include neurodivergent characters in his more recent books. I particularly enjoyed the crows in Children of Memory, who are ADHD and Autistic. I’m considering getting paperback copies to add to the Little Neurodivergent Library at work.

In the The Final Architecture books, the ‘ints’ are neurodivergent – most have deliberately damaged brains that allows them to process the world in a way entirely differently to the majority of the population. Some are naturals – like the first ‘int’, Saint Zavienne, and some of the Partheni new class who have the ‘right’ genetics for sensitivity to unspace travel, but most have an acquire brain injury that makes the neurodivergent. They are significantly disabled by their brains, and Idris is one of the most disabled. He’s also the oldest, one of the original class, almost a hundred years old; never aging, never sleeping, always anxious, always highly stimulated. His obsession with finding the Masters, the ones driving the Architects to destroy sentient life in the universe, pushes him close to death, multiple times. Usually he only survives because of some piece of tech or emergency procedures taken by his friends and occasionally his enemies.

I found Idris to be a bit of a wet blanket, but he admits to being a weak, ‘little’, man. He’s small and physically weak from his early years of deprivation, his long life of hard labour fighting the Architects and travelling in the unreal. He has a strong spirit and his frustration with people who won’t listen and who won’t consider the implications of their actions resonates. He is opposed to genocide, which is a perfectly reasonable position to hold, and he seeks the first cause. I can agree with that position. I don’t think we’ll find an intergalactic species desperate to recreate the conditions of their original universe at the centre of our problems however.

Idris is the driver of the mission, but the driver of the plot is Olli, who along with Kitt the Hanni are the remaining crew of the Vulture God, while everyone else is on the Eye buggering about in unspace. Olli, being a suspicious bint, doesn’t trust anyone, particularly the ‘parthos’ – the women of the Partheny. And she’s right to be suspicious, as she uncovers a breakaway group plotting a coup, and helping the arc-ship building cabal. A pointless war breaks out between Hu and the Partheny. Olli and Kitt take the ship, and an Ogdru (an aquatic species that can navigate unspace) called Junior out of it and try to save everyone.

Eventually, they end up saving the universe. Olli gains various items from the Hegemony, after she becomes heir to ‘The Razor and The Scythe’, as Unspeakable, head of a crime syndicate, and by the end of the novel, head of her own nation. Olli is my favourite character, and I really want a novel about her adventures as Unspeakable. Her attitude of ‘fuck it’, her willingness to try whatever she needs to do to survive and to help her friends survive, and her magic legs from the Hegemony, make her an engaging, fun character.

The story is complicated and has several parts. First the mission on the Eye, then the war, then the rescue, and finally back to the mission. The narrative uses multiple voices to tell the story – a limited 3rd person omniscience – and there is some overlap between the chapters as the same events are told by different characters and then taken forward. Since events happen across hundreds of thousands of kilometres of space, this is quite helpful. I enjoyed seeing events from multiple perspectives.

The narrator, Sophie Aldred, is very good. She gives each character their own personality. She has really good pacing and inflection, although some of her pronunciations are wrong. I enjoyed listening to this audiobook. I found myself looking forward to getting back to it while also finding ways to stretch it out because I didn’t want the story to end.

If you’ve enjoyed Adrian Tchaikovsky’s other books, you’ll probably enjoy this one. The man publishes two or three books a year, so you’ll probably always have something to read/listen to. He’s really good at space opera with relatable human (and nom-human) characters.