Eyes of the Void

Review originally posted on Geeky Galaxy.

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

When I was writing up the 2022 Sci-Fi Book Releases Masterlist, I stumbled across Eyes of the Void on Netgalley and immediately hit “Request” despite saying to myself I wasn't requesting anymore books until I'd gone through the awkwardly long list of books I hadn't yet reviewed. When Pan Mac accepted the request, I dropped everything else and started reading because I loved Shards of Earth and couldn't wait to see what awaited our rag-tag bunch in the next book.

Eyes of the Void is told in multiple POVs from pretty much every important character. Each member of the Vulture God crew plus some others, such as a human spy. Every character held their own for their own chapters with strong voice and exciting information to add to the overall story; none of the chapters felt unnecessary or superfluous.

The Final Architecture has become one of those series for me where I want to absorb as much information about the world as possible, so whilst this story felt slightly different to Shards of Earth as there was more room for exploring the wider universe and introducing more of the world, I was totally here for it. One additional aspect is the Naeromathi (hopefully I copied that down correctly!) a fascinating species that seems to have dealt with the Architects before. In classic Tchaikovsky style, they're about as alien as you could get. You could never accuse Tchaikovsky of creating aliens that are just humans with some added scales or limbs. They're always so much more than that. Much stranger. Much more interesting. Much more alien.

The Naeromathi are just one of the additional plot threads introduced in Eyes of the Void. There's also plenty of political in-fighting in the Hugh, warmongering between everyone and everyone else (like the Parthenon and Hugh or the Hegemony and possibly everyone else). The tension of the political world of The Final Architecture rests on a knife-edge throughout Eyes of the Void and I enjoyed every word of it.

And with everything else going on, don't forget the Architects are out to reform planets with billions of people living there. No big deal. Eyes of the Void has a lot going on, I won't lie. It's the sort of book you want to sit and enjoy in peace and quiet to ensure you can catch everything that's going on and keep up with everything in the moment.

You definitely want to be focusing on the fight scenes too. Whether it's battles between a Partheni who takes no bullshit versus a bunch of xenophobes or a solar-system wide battle of everyone vs Architects, it is sure to not let you down. Tchaikovsky balances the quick pace of a hard-won battle against awesome descriptions of someone's shoulder having a hole punched through it by a particularly nasty weapon well. Speaking of holes in shoulders... I wouldn't recommend this if you're squeamish at all. Whether it's humans, human-adjacent or strange-as-aliens, everyone bleeds, everyone dies... everyone can get torn into four pieces. Don't say you weren't warned!

Finally, I'm going to mention the crew of the Vulture God; Idris, Solace, Olli, Kris, Kittering. Sometimes, The Final Architecture feels like the story of Idris. He's so important to everything that's going on, and frankly, the crew do spend more time either protecting or rescuing him than pretty much everything else. But each character holds their own and has a place and a story of their own to tell. I sat for a while trying to decide who my favourite character is, and honestly, I couldn't pick one. I love Solace, the badass Partheni who won't back down from a fight. Kris, the lawyer, with a violent history who isn't afraid to talk down a fight but also whip out her blade at a moment's notice. Maybe Olli, the tech specialist who walks around in a damn metal scorpion and has one hell of a mouth on her. Kittering, the hiver who, most of the time, probably just wants some peace and quiet, but has plenty of intelligence buried beneath the fear. Honestly, that whole crew are epic.

I could keep going, but this is already approaching too many words!