Eyes of the Void

Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky | Book 2 of the Final Architecture

Eyes of the Void is the second instalment of the Final Architecture trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published by Orbit in May 2022. Picking up after the events of Shards of Earth, it expands the already vast canvas of the series - more factions, more species, more mysteries - while narrowing its focus onto the question that drives the whole trilogy: what are the Architects, and why do they do what they do?

The fragile peace that followed the first Architect War has held for eighty years. Humanity rebuilt, spread further across the stars, and tried very hard to forget the era when moon-sized crystalline entities arrived without warning to twist entire planets into abstract sculpture, killing everything on the surface. But the Architects are back. Worse, the Originator artefacts - relics of a vanished elder civilisation that had previously been enough to make Architects veer away from protected worlds - no longer work. Suddenly, no planet is safe. The Human Colonies are in turmoil, fractured between those who want a unified response and those who insist humanity must go it alone, while opportunists on every side seek to exploit the chaos for their own ends.

At the centre of everything, as before, is Idris Telemmier. As one of the last surviving Intermediaries - humans surgically and psychologically altered to navigate unspace without losing their minds - Idris is a resource every faction desperately wants to control. He has spent decades trying to stay small and unnoticed, crewing the salvage ship Vulture God with a motley collection of allies who have become the closest thing to family any of them have. Now he is being forced back into the war, and back into unspace, where the horrors that broke and remade his mind are waiting.

What Idris discovers in unspace - and what the discovery means for everything humanity thought it understood about the Architects - forms the spine of Eyes of the Void and sets up the trilogy's explosive conclusion. Tchaikovsky handles the slow revelation with considerable skill: answers arrive, but each answer opens three new questions, and the overall shape of the mystery deepens rather than contracts as the book progresses. Locus described the novel as "layered," with a plot "punctuated by a series of broadening, deepening, and complicating reveals," and that is an accurate characterisation of the reading experience.

The found family dynamic of the Vulture God crew - which is genuinely funny, genuinely warm, and laced with the dry wit that makes Tchaikovsky's character writing so enjoyable - continues to give the cosmic-scale plot its human grounding. Olli in particular, the crew's formidably resourceful engineer, is a series highlight across all three books, and gets some of her best moments here. Publishers Weekly praised the "intelligent worldbuilding" and called the plot "humorous, sometimes convoluted, but always memorable" - a fair summary of what to expect from a book that is unambiguously a setup volume, but a thoroughly entertaining one.

For readers who loved Shards of Earth, Eyes of the Void delivers exactly what a second book should: the world gets bigger, the stakes get higher, and the questions get more urgent. Do not read it without the first book. And once you finish it, Lords of Uncreation is waiting to answer everything.