And, while I did actually get to do some truly bizarre space combat in Children of Ruin, I’ve never really had the chance to script a great big starship battle before, and the series certainly has a few of them. To the extent that many of them don’t even have heads or hands. I enjoyed cutting loose a bit, having humanity butting heads and shaking hands with a whole range of other spacefaring species – whilst at the same time ensuring that the aliens in question were still, well, alien. The universe of Shards of Earth and the Architects was enormous fun to create. Which is unfortunate as he and his crew discover evidence that the Architects are back, and that the war might just still be on… Idris, working as navigator for the deep space salvage ship Vulture God, wants nothing of it. Humanity is slowly recovering from the generations-long PTSD of living in the shadow of the Architects, but at the same time is losing the cultural unity the war bred, fragmenting into parties and factions, at the brink of conflict both against alien polities and other human groups. Now the Architects have gone, as mysteriously as they arrived, and he just wants to live out his unnaturally prolonged days out of the spotlight. Although ‘war’ is overstating the case because the Architects quite possibly didn’t understand that ‘humanity’ existed per se. Idris was an Intermediary, a surgically enhanced navigator and weapon in humanity's war with the Architects. The first humanity knows about them is when they do it to Earth. They turn up above populated planets – only populated ones – and wring them into hideous works of abstract art, which doesn’t go well for anyone living there at the time. Of meeting the thing that lives in unspace, that everyone knows isn’t really there except for navigators like Idris whose job it is to stay awake through the voyage.Īnd unspace is also where the Architects come from, whether they live there or just travel its reaches freely. All well and good, except that unspace is sufficiently nasty to the sentient mind that you need to be put under for the trip or risk going mad. In this universe, you get from place to place via unspace, a hyperspace-style deal, so a short trip there covers light-years of real space. well, the precise shenanigans used to get from star to star in Shards of Earth aren’t just a convenient shortcut, but turned out to be rather integral to everything that goes on in the series, and especially to the life and problems of its lead, poor old Idris Telemmier. Of course, once I’d decided on that, I had to complicate things and think through even the rather speculative hand-wavy science I was conjecturing and. Which worked very well for those books, but did have me yearning to take the tech up a notch and write something about cultures and species spanning the galaxy, not just a little knot of neighbouring stars. Going to another star system can take from decades to millennia depending on the distances and relative levels of technology. For most of the series, the idea of travelling faster than light simply isn’t an option. Children of Time has been described as space opera in some reviews, but it was certainly written with the intention of being bound by scientific principles as we currently understand them. Basically, it’s all about going faster than light.
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