Book Thoughts: Final Architecture (1-3)
After my little daliance with Adrian Tchaikovsky's standalone scifi works and a random algorithm blasting of Warhammer 40K lorecontent (thanks?) I decided it was time to flirt with a little space opera and take on his Final Architecture trilogy (audiobook versions).
I'm not normally a space opera person -- I like my scifi a little harder and without ice -- but since I was drifting through a casual reading phase and looking for something light, I thought "why not?" for I like both the author and the narrator.
I come away reminded why I'm not normally a space opera person.
In my mind space opera and cheap fantasy are essentially the same thing; a quest where some party is gathered, they go to a bunch of different locations, there's some magic or tech involved and a bunch of different races, and then the party saves the day but loses a couple members in the progress. Go ahead and switch alien slugs and spooky technology with elves and magic. Replace the crab-like race obsessed with weath with dwarves. Replace the moon-sized death monsters destroying planets with dragons wiping out villages. As Tchaikovsky has written some really fantastic alien-perspective scifi I was hoping for a little something more here, but ultimately the entire series read like a half-assed D&D campaign. At least fantasy has an opportunity to world build more than humans but in space and there's some other guys that are basically weird humans.
That isn't to say there's nothing to love about a half-assed D&D campaign -- I did, after all, finish the series. I've run my share of memorable campaigns and played a lot of good ol' fashioned RPGs with similar story beats -- but real fun of this kind of story is in the experience; being in it, not reading about it.
There was nothing here to make me ponder or wonder, nothing that inspired me in the least or felt particularly novel. I'm not sure there was supposed to be, to be fair -- there's a big audience for this kind of content and once upon a time I, too, loved me a simple fantasy romp.
The next time I'm inspired to pick up a space opera series I'll hopefully look back here for a reminder as to why I generally avoid the genre.