Shards of Earth (The Final Architecture #1)

I liked this first installment in a space opera story, with mind powers, aliens, symbionts, FTL travel, gravitic technology, and vastly powerful warring factions. There are plenty of villains that menace our protagonists but the big bads are he moon-sized entities known as Architects whose motives for wiping out inhabited worlds is the essential mystery at the heart of the plot. The two main viewpoint characters are the deep void navigator Idris and the supersoldier clone warrior Solace who have a bond going back decades from when the Architects were repelled the first time around. Now after generations it seems as though they might be returning. There are spooks and agents of spooky aliens, blustering diplomats, and a scrappy salvage ship crew Idris belongs to who manage to claim our affections. They try and fail, have narrow escapes, emotional losses, and inevitably find themselves at the crucial lopsided showdown. I'm making it sound formulaic, but it does everything with style and sells it to the reader over and over in a way I admire. The canvas is not as vast as that of Iain M. Banks's Culture books, but the maneuvering is more lightweight too, so that's all right. Sometimes books of this type indulge in painfully arch dialogue (not naming names) but this was mercifully not the case as I see it here. Can the sequel deliver on the expectations with stakes driven as high as they have? I intend to find out for myself.

The audiobook narration was a pleasure with Sophie Aldred hamming up the character's idiosyncracies in an entertaining fashion. There's lot of unreasonable things the various speakers make her say, but she manages to make them sound as if it's coming from a multi-dimensional individual almost always.