Splintered Suns

Humanity's Fire #5

by Michael Cobley

Action-orientated space opera witha spaceship crewed by rogues and scoundrels , from the author of Seeds of Earth -perfect for fans of Star Wars , Firefly or Farscape'Proper galaxy-spanning space opera' Iain M. Banks on Seeds of EarthAction-orientated sci-fi with a spaceship crewed by rogues and scoundrels, perfect for fans of Star Wars , Firefly or FarscapeFor Pyke and his crew it should have been just another heist. Travel to a backwater desert planet, break into a museum, steal a tracking device then use it to find a ship buried in the planet's vast and trackless sandy wastes.Except that the museum vault is a bio-engineered chamber, and the tracking device is sought after by another gang of treasure hunters led by an old adversary of Pyke's, the devious Raven Kaligara. Also, the ship is a quarter of a million years old and about two kilometres long and somewhere aboard it is the Essavyr Key, a relic to unlock all the treasures and technologies of a lost civilisation . . .' Splintered Suns splices new and old space opera, cyberpunk, quest fantasy and heist caper -- the maddest thing I've read since Van Vogt!'Ken MacLeod" Splintered Suns is a masterpiece of future nostalgia. All who love mischievous interstellar derring-do in pursuit of ancient relics of departed races as well as exotic panoplies of sentient species, all who love space opera should feast upon this generous novel. Let us revel in the admirable jaunty technicolour richness which Mike Cobley serves up so entertainingly-for this is how the universe ought to be "Ian Watson , author of the Games Workshop Warhammer 40K novels Space Marine and The Inquisition War trilogy

Genres: Science Fiction, Space Opera, Space, Time Travel, Fiction

512 pages, Paperback

First published December 4, 2018

About the author

Mike Cobley was born in Leicester and has lived in Scotland since the age of seven. Although the Scottish cultural heritage informs much of his own outlook (egalitarian, argumentative yet amiable, and able to appreciate rain), he thinks of himself as a citizen of the world.

While studying engineering at Strathclyde University, he discovered the joys and risks of student life and pursued a sideline career as a DJ, possibly to the detriment of his studies. The heady round of DJ'ing, partying and student gigs palled eventually, but by then his interests had been snagged by an encounter with Pirsig's 'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance' which led him off on a philosophical and political odyssey which continues to this day.

The desire to write had its first burgeoning when he was 20/21, resulting in the creation of a short fantasy novel (that has never seen the light of day!). He later wrote a string of articles/rants for the campus paper at Strathclyde University under the pen-name Phaedrus, at the same time as he began writing short stories. Mike harbour much affection for the short story form, but has had little opportunity to write them since beginning work on the Shadowkings trilogy.

The 1st 2 volumes of the trilogy - Shadowkings and Shadowgod - have been published by Simon & Schuster's now-defunct imprint Earthlight, and the 3rd part - Shadowmasque - will be published by Simon & Schuster-Pocket at the end of 2004. Mike has a number of ideas and concepts for his next big project but they're being kept on the backburner for the time being. The publication of Iron Mosaic will be a personal milestone for him, as well as a showcase of the topics and techiques which have intrigued him since the publication of his first short story back in 1986. And just recently, he has had appeared in the Thackery T Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, with a monologue upon the malady known as 'Parabubozygosia', which is not for the faint-hearted!

Reviews

[Nick Alcock · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is not a review of Splintered Suns. It's a panning. I will spoil it freely because you really, really don't want to read it. But first, let's let the protagonist describe its plot: "death-defying drek". (Yes, it really is spelt that way.)

(remainder would be spoiler-tagged but spoiler-tagging appears to require me to have to close all my para tags: hell no. There is a lot of spoilage because I made over a thousand notes on this thing and I don't want to waste them! And also because I don't care what happens to these characters any more and neither should you.)

I read this for the local SF book club, because one club member had accidentally read it by mistake instead of the previous month's book, and, I dunno, perhaps he didn't want to suffer alone.

This is Cobley's eighth book (and first standalone). The author is very impressed with all his hard work and has in the past complained about people giving his books low Amazon ratings on the grounds that they are not as bad as the Eye of Argon. Good news: this isn't! But it is
definitely in the bottom 20% of books I've read lately. Probably the bottom 5%. And that includes the fanfic.

Iain Banks puffs the author on the cover: presumably this was for an earlier book, but I really, really wonder why. It is possible that this book is drastically worse than everything else he's ever written: a 'contractual obligation book', as it were. But I wouldn't bet on it.

It was reviewed ecstatically by Eric Brown in the Guardian, which you'd usually assume would be a good sign. However, um, the acknowledgements at the back specifically thank... Eric Brown! Yes, this was a classic piece of log-rolling.

What does the author get right? It's hard to say. I started out thinking his grasp of pacing wasn't bad, but then the middle of the book happened. He does manage to flow from one page to the next reasonably well, I suppose. He is good at setpiece scenery, as long as you can read past the clunkiness of the descriptions and everything that happens in amongst this scenery.

His worldbuilding is not bad, as long as you ignore the fact that he doesn't know how orbits work (you cannot connect planets to each other with cables, nor can you connect a star to all its planets with cables, no matter what they are made of, unless they are of infinitely variable length and you don't mind them getting massively tangled up and/or breaking) and apparently not how living organisms work (you don't need to 'scan for life signs' if you are looking at possible mammals and have a camera, you just turn the camera on, since they pick up IR). He seems to think you can freeze time but still wander around the time-frozen region and look at it, as if light is unaffected even though time is explicitly stated to be frozen for the stars in the region and we wander around near one without getting roasted. I don't think he's very good at thinking through the consequences of his worldbuilding.

But even given that... the worldbuilding has bizarrely modern-day aspects, some sufficiently dated that I could guess the author's age, knowing he was English. Everyone's using Imperial and multiplying and dividing things by twelve as a matter of course: thus, author is over fifty. I just checked Wikipedia: Michael Cobley is 59. It is not plausible to me that a far-future society's members would use metaphors like "comparable to being pulled over by the cops for having a faulty indicator glyph", particularly given the near-complete absence of the forces of law and order everywhere else in the plot. "Indicator glyphs" are mentioned nowhere else: of course they aren't.

But forget the worldbuilding. The first thing that will catch the sufferer's eye is none of this: it's the number of grossly infelicious phrases and outright grammatical errors. The prologue and first two
chapters are much worse than the rest of the book for this, which makes me suspect they were either added late (and not proofread) or added early and never revised. In both cases I'm left wondering whether Orbit has any editors or proofreaders. Surely any competent one would have
caught this:

"Such babbling delirium can only be fuelled by some kind of mental derangement", he paused to rub an itch on his back against a section of the ribbed surface of the garage’s bulkhead interior.

or this brazenly misplaced comma:

He was still tracking the intruder, assigning additional system resources to enhance the image for more detail and texture yet, stubbornly, it refused to resolve into anything but a black silhouette.

or this comma splice:

"Please explain, please identify yourself."

For anyone with the proofreader gene, It's like reading with someone jamming spikes into your eyes at frequent intervals.

These are from the prologue alone. Dig further into the book and you find a lot more, from number errors ("topographical comparisons scans") through to missing words ("equivalent to a century or more out here reality"; "a dense of curved splines", which is probably a dense forest of curved spines) or buggered-up endings ("a small seated area") through to places where he just doesn't know what words mean.

He refers to things as opaque when he means translucent, and translucent when he means opaque, and thinks that 'satire' is another word for 'sarcasm'. He doesn't know what irony is. He mixes up stern and aft, and mystic and mythical. Even the title is wrong: the term for a star that is entirely covered in stuff to catch all its light would be 'shrouded': I can see no way one could call it 'splintered' unless one doesn't know what 'splintered' means.

Even when the grammar is right, it's often so clunky that it's borderline unparseable.

So here they were on a desert planet called Ong, so far off the beaten track that Earthsphere was unheard of and the mighty Sendrukan Hegemony was known as the semi-legendary Perpetual Empire.

It took me several re-parses to figure out that probably the Sendrukan Empire was an extant entity and these guys were such rubes that they had its name wrong. I'm still not sure this is the correct parse.

The author has a massive case of adjectivitis. I just counted, and on a randomly-selected couple of pages the rate of adjectivization of nouns is 48%. That's enormously higher than in normal English and far higher than is remotely sane. It sticks out, particularly when Cobley gets into a run of them and runs out of adjectives to describe something, so one character's hands are first described as 'meaty', then 'rough', then... uh... 'big', all within a few pages.

Even when the language isn't clunky, it's flowery done badly and completely at random, using ridiculously obscure words like 'durance'. The worst is probably one character saying that someone else should be "returning from where he came". NO.

The author also has a massive case of adjectivitis. I just counted, and on a randomly-selected couple of pages the rate of adjectivized nouns is 48%. That's massively higher than in normal English and far higher than is remotely sane. It sticks out, particularly when Cobley gets into a run of them and runs out of adjectives to describe something, so one character's hands are first described as 'meaty', then 'rough', then... uh... 'big', all within a few pages.

The coinages and names are hilariously dreadful: "Ong" is not the worst of them. We have 'detects' and 'detectioners' but it's halfway through the book that the word 'detector' appears: we have 'heuristals'. You can apparently engage in telepathy by using a "neuropathic field": it looks like he generalized from "telepathy" without realising that "neuropathic" would mean something that kills neurons, which would be rather bad for communicating anything other than "I hate you". Some things might not even be coinages but outright errors, like describing pillars as 'obsidiate' or something as having 'violent leaves on dark blue bines'. Space-time has been replaced with "space-time-space": it looks like the author doesn't know why space-time is called that, or he'd realise that jamming an extra "-space" in there is less futuristic than it is stupid-sounding and meaningless.

The thing is full of obtrusive infodumps, starting with a coincidental meeting with a deep-space probe that just happens to portentuously dump vague allusions to the plot to come before so-conveniently running out of power (?! it's an extragalactic probe, it should have power for eons). It is never explained how this probe got to learn any of this stuff, nor who sent it, nor why it should be interested in finding out yet uninterested in telling anyone about it in any kind of useful fashion. The extragalactic probe speaks English! Everyone speaks English, even people from millions of years in the past: if they are mentioned as wearing any kind of translator device this is because it is
going to break down.

Most of these infodumps come from characters who spend nearly all their time offscreen, and they're full of some of the worst technobabble I have ever read. The on-screen characters basically just do whatever the hell they want, without planning, and get nowhere until someone offscreen turns up abruptly to impede them or assist with newly-introduced technobabble. The technobabble is literally Trekkian in that you could replace it all with "tech the tech" and the meaning would not change -- except that it's sometimes inconsistently spelled on the same page, which Trek would never do (e.g. "master directives network" suddenly becomes the "master directories network" and is then never mentioned again.)

The offscreen characters who drive the plot are mostly much more interesting than the actual protagonists, but get very little page time despite doing everything significant to the plot themselves. The principal protagonist does nothing useful. He is identified in the first terrible infodump as "one who doubts himself", but never shows a hint of self-doubt. What he is is one who swears a lot in terrible invented slang ("put a lag on the blag, ould son", "skagging",
"bastarding hell" no that is not how expletive substitution works in English, you cannot cut the "ing" off "fucking" and attach it to another word like this). He's one who is clearly a moron, acting more or less at random without thinking at all, explicitly refusing to plan even when it's essential, and managing to get himself trussed up by randomly attacking someone who taunts him at the one point in the plot at which he really must be unrestrained, which he has just been reminded of on the previous page. But one who doubts himself? No. I guess the author forgot that bit of characterization, just like he sometimes forgets where characters are located and has them enter or leave rooms twice, or has them using things they threw away on the previous page. He has characters talk about things that happened "soon after we met" when that was five minutes ago. On one occasion he has a character describe one he talked to in the previous paragraph as missing, possibly because he mixed up the names. (Another character was missing at the time). That was in chapter one, and was when I realised that nobody had proofread or edited this.

The author has clearly seen Firefly and now and then the villain and/or protagonist channels Mal Reynolds, e.g. the villain describing branding the protag's crew as "just a passing whim that got out of hand". However, Joss Whedon can do camaraderie, oh can he ever. Cobley refers to what he's doing as 'banter' but oh my god could you ever get more clunky than this, even ignoring the horrible fake expletives, most of which appear for the one and only time in this paragraph? Even the register is inconsistent:

"Uh-huh. Look, we’ve been through some pretty crazy stuff, some really weird-ass, skagged-out, brain-mangling shit – and we’re still together. Maybe this guy could be just the guide we need, or maybe he’s a walking, talking scuzzbag sent by some toxic thugazoid to frack us over good and proper. My advice? Hope for the former, but assume the latter. So, with that in mind, what’s our next move?"

Whedon would turn in his nonexistent grave.

There are quite a lot of characters but I couldn't tell you most of their names because with a couple of exceptions they are indistinguishable cardboard cutouts. Even the ones who are
distinguishable are vaporous (like the villain, who has lots of underlings she treats terribly and who never get the dignity of names): the villain is working for a badly-sealed evil in a can who wants to end all life in the galaxy in a tide of evil nanotech (sigh) but at no point is it explained why a villain whose only stated motivations are money and sadism wants to off all her potential customers and potential victims at once, nor what she expects to get out of exterminating everything. (Unconvincingly, the badly-sealed evil at one point late in the book says that "the empire will need administrators", but if the "empire" is a mass of nonliving nanotech that eats planets why on earth
would it want to keep living administrators?! Needless to say this uber-villain has no motivation or personality at all: it's just a faceless monster that has to be kept in its can.)

But enough about the 'characterization'. What about the plot?

Not only is the plot driven by infodumps, so the protagonist literally has to do nothing but smash something late in the book (which any other character could have done just as well, and which he is explicitly told to do by an offscreen character and even so nearly screws up), but the plot sags and is desperately padded. The protagonist gets dumped into a virtual environment and split into a simulated copy (the author appears to think that being in a virtual environment means you are necessarily a simulated copy of yourself), and later a bunch more people are, which gives the author a good excuse to have characters tell other characters things that already happened earlier in the book. Sometimes he forgets who's who and has characters tell other characters things they
themselves witnessed, or, in one case, actually did themselves. I guess "as you did Bob" is the new "as you know Bob".

The virtual environment is memorable in a bad way. It's run by the sealed evil in a can, and for reasons never clearly explained the evil is running these simulated people through various really bad tests in which their memories get overwritten until you touch particular objects and then they have to solve really clunky detective-style puzzles in unconvincing medieval-ish environments. We go through one or two of these and there is nothing much to distinguish them... but we spend about half the book in there, in an environment in which even the protagonist says that doing, or not doing, anything is more or less pointless because they don't actually have any reason to carry out the commands of the badly-sealed evil in a can in any case. But they do it anyway. I guess they're bored, or the author has to make up a page count.

But don't worry, just as we get close to the climactic part of this, we cut away and cut back once everything is accomplished! I guess the author couldn't figure out how to get his protagonists through the barriers he'd placed in their way: he doesn't even use a handwave, just switching the viewpoint to a character who is conveniently rendered something-like-unconscious for the duration. (The viewpoint hardly ever switches away from the dreadfully-named Brannan Pyke, so this switch stands out.)

The badly-sealed evil in a can swaps people into this virtual environment when it possesses their bodies, and in a twist brazenly stolen from The Anubis Gates sets them up to die right before swapping back. Our protagonist already knows this doesn't work very well because he escaped death and now exists in both places at once (and has convenient visions to remind him of this), and the all-powerful sealed evil in a can is apparently not evil enough to off the copy it's maintaining -- so why on earth does he respond with "anguish" to seeing other members of his crew in there? He knows this is potentially nonlethal because one of those crewmembers arranged for him to avoid death when it happened to him: so why presume that it happened to them? I can only presume that either the author forgot or the protagonist is a moron. Or both, I suppose.

The plot is full of unfired Chekhov's guns. One character is described as being a fused personality after a personality backup went wrong. Even his previous name is given -- but the other character he is a fusion of is someone who stays on the ship for the entire book and we see perhaps twice, and the fused personality is never brought up again. Either the fusion should have happened in the middle of the book, or it should have fallen apart or otherwise caused trouble or benefit to our characters at some point. Instead the author forgot about it.

The entire first half of the book consists of chasing down a contraption called the Angular Eye, which lets you find various relics of ancient civilizations etc. This is all-important to such a degree that the cardboard villain waves it at them before stepping through a portal and vanishing. The portal must have been a mindwipe portal because after our protagonists follow her through it the Angular Eye is never mentioned again.

Talking about guns, the protagonists are obsessed with them. Every one is carefully described (or, rather, undescribed: one gun is said to have "nodes": what do they look like, then?), but... I believe these are people who hunt down relics of ancient civilizations, mostly. Why on earth are they obsessed with weapons? Relics rarely shoot back. Archaeologists, even mavericks, are precise and careful people. This lot never plan anything.

But there are strong female characters! Sure, one of them has the hots for our hero, but she does nothing about it and later on we figure out that in fact they are exes, fairly plausibly depicted at that. A shame that every single one of these apparently strong female characters turns out to be doing the bidding of some man or entity that presents as male, is more or less incapable of acting without continuous direction (the world is ending but the male-presenting characters are gone, let's just sit here and mope until more men turn up) and all of them get more or less killed off by the end of the book. (Mind you, so do most of the male characters -- but not all.)

There is one exception, but a) she's not particularly human b) she is predictably treasonous to the point that I don't understand why everyone doesn't just shoot her on sight, I mean she betrays people even when it is clearly in her best short and long-term interest to cooperate and c) she gets seriously wounded and survives only because a man rescues her.

At least the female characters don't spend their time talking to each other about the men -- but then they hardly talk to each other at all. I'm not sure if this book passes the Bechdel test...

... but frankly even if it doesn't that's not the worst thing wrong with it by far.

I'd recommend not only avoiding this work, but on the basis of that avoiding everything this author has ever written or will ever write. If it wasn't that he's clearly read The Anubis Gates I'd recommend avoiding everything he's ever read as well.

[The Tattooed Book Geek (Drew). · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always this review can also be found on my blog The Tattooed Book Geek: https://thetattooedbookgeek.wordpress...

Captain Brannan Pyke of the Ship, Scarabus and his riff-raff and ragtag crew. The first mate, Dervla, Ancil, Moleg, Oleg and Kref are contracted by their employer Van Graes to steal a tracking device, the Angular Eye from the City of Cawl-Vesh on the desert planet Ong.

Van Graes is a collector of ancient alien artefacts and he hopes that The Angular Eye can be used to locate the wreck of an ancient ship and the wealth of knowledge and treasure that it holds. Millennia ago, the ship, the Mighty Defender of the Arraveyne Empire was the only ship to escape the collapse of the Arraveyne Imperium. However, during the escape, the ship caught the attention of the Damaugra (a mythical sentient metal monster made of coils and tentacles). The Damaugra relentlessly chased the ship through space, damaging it beyond repair and causing it to crash on the planet Ong. Where its wreckage has remained buried and hidden in the vast desert ever since.

The crew are successful in stealing the device. Then, moments later, the device, is in turn stolen from the hands of Pyke by his nemesis, the unhinged psychopath Raven Kaligara and her bunch of hired goons who had also been tasked with stealing the Eye by their own employer.

After their failure to obtain The Angular Eye Pyke contacts Van Graes and lets him know the bad news. That Raven was one step ahead of them and that she is now in possession of the Eye. Van Graes offers to pay Pyke extra to track down Raven and get the device back from out of her clutches.

Pyke accepts the offer and Van Graes puts him in contact with the Sendrukan scientist Lieutenant-Doctor Ustril (an expert on the Arraveyne Imperium) who will be able to help them. Raven uses the Eye to locate the ancient ship. But, unbeknownst to her, each time the Eye is used it lets of a signal of its own which itself, can be tracked. Pyke, his crew and Lieutenant-Doctor Ustril follow the signals from the Eye and find the massive ship and Raven in the Ong desert.

At the same time as the story is unfolding on Ong and in the corridors of the labyrinthine ship, there is another story taking place concurrently. Inside a crystal, a simulation has been set up by an alien A.I known as ‘The Legacy‘. Anyone who has touched the crystal in the real world leaves an imprint of themselves that is then brought to life in the simulation. Taking place on the Isle of Candles and in the city of Granah (which has a distinct fantasy setting feel to it) The Legacy has set the inhabitants of the simulation a mystery to solve.

The two storylines are joined together and build to a conclusion that has huge ramifications for both the simulated world and the real world. It is hard to elaborate on the simulation, its purpose and how it ties into what is happening in the remains of the Mighty Defender of the Arraveyne Empire for fear of spoiling the story, so, I won’t. Instead, I’ll just write that both storylines are interesting, both keep you invested and both feature some creative ideas used by Cobley (in particular, the Steel Forest and its inhabitants are utterly bizarre and weird).

Pyke is a loquacious sort of fellow with an Irish twang to his vocabulary and a tendency towards being rather verbose. In other words, he likes the sound of his own voice, is often ready with a speech, always has a witticism or quip to hand and the camaraderie and banter between him and his crew is fantastic.

For all that I really liked Pyke and his crew, particularly, Dervla and Ancil. I have to admit to being equally drawn to Raven. Pyke has a decency to him, a moral compass, he tries to do the right thing and cares about his crew. Raven, well, Raven lacks any sort of decency, only cares about herself, is completely a moral and a total lunatic. Throughout the story, she is a great foil for Pyke as they duke it out trading barbs and bullets.

There are quite a few terms that are bandied around by the characters in Splintered Suns but they don’t get in the way of the story. Their use never feels overly excessive or confusing even to a casual SFF reader like myself and I feel that Splintered Suns is an accessible, fast-paced and fun SFF read.

Though Splintered Suns is billed as a standalone I would be interested in reading any future and further adventures of Captain Brannan Pyke should Cobley choose to write any.

Splintered Suns is a raucous romp and a rollicking roller-coaster of a space adventure that is brimming with miscreants, races, rogues, scoundrels and heart.

[Koen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Splintered Suns
Written by Micheal Cobley
ISBN 978-0-356-50966-2
Published by Orbit
Cover illustration by Steve Stone.

Please check the website of Steve Stone, an amazing illustrator: http://www.stevestoneartworks.com

Had to read this book from Micheal Cobley after reading the complete series of Humanity’s Fire and I really do like this book. It has a lot of action and adventure, however also a lot situations that I recall as being a little over the top.

Scarabus, the space ship of Captain Brannan Pyke.

Crew of the Scarabus:
Dervla
Oleg
Kref
Moleg
Ancil

[Stuart Cliffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning Imagery & Frantic Action

Full marks to Michael Cobley for imagery and descriptive writing - this has been a roller-coaster of a novel with genuinely new (well new to me, anyway) ideas about character development and storyline. It's not exactly my preferred style of story - belief has not so much to be suspended as thrown out the window on occasion - but it's extremely well told. Well worth a read.

[Dev Null · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled with this a bit, and did finish it in the end, but can't go much better than "ok". The characters are all caricatures of themselves: Pirate Captain, Sneak Thief, Steely Woman Merc, Psycho - they have no depth, and don't feel at all like real people. It's like watching an old Black Adder episode: the situation may be amusing, but you don't believe any of the people are real. The plot is convoluted - involving alternate dimensions, virtual realities, and time travel - and full of Trekkian technobabble explanations, but none of it really seems to matter to the story. Which seems to boil down to:

Bunch of humans do some largely irrelevant stuff.
Drone character introduced in a flashback touches a magic crystal ("offscreen", even from the flashback) and is loaded into a virtual world.
Copy of drone in virtual world does everything of significance from this point forward - including saving the world from Evil Menace - occasionally popping back to explain things to the hapless biologicals in the midst of their irrelevant adventures.

The irrelevant adventures _were_ amusing at times, when you could disentangle them from the convoluted twists of time and dimension. So I didn't hate the book, but I didn't care about it much either.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wanted to enjoy this but found it hard going and despite great ideas quite baffling and at times difficult to follow.

[Sean Brodrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Splintered Suns is a rollicking space romp, and I mean that in the best possible way. It has some small problems, which is why my rating is 4 stars, not 5. But it has enough big ideas for three novels, along with adventure, humor, brilliant imagery, and non-stop action. I plan to read the others in the series, which is the best recommendation you can want for a book in a series; it sucks you in.

Some spoilers below.

The good: The world building is fantastic. From the steel jungle, which is what remains of an alien spaceship that crashed 100,000 years ago, to time zones running like a maze through earlier versions of said ancient spaceship, "The Mighty Defender" to an entire "pocket star cluster" and associated adventurous realms located inside a crystal. It's dizzying -- dazzling.

Second only to that is Mr. Cobley's technobabble. He creates (or at least mugs and borrows) words to describe the far-fetched concepts in his book. These words flow easily and are the building blocks for the adventure, to explain what is happening now, or a hundred thousand years in the past, or millions of years ago.

The characters are good, not great. I did like them though, and when some died, I felt real sympathy. And I was wrapped up in the "thieving adventure" contained in the world inside the crystal.

The not-so-good. I'm the kind of person who wonders about characters' motivations. Let's take the main baddy, Raven. What is she getting out of this exactly? It can't be money; when her partner/boss, the big baddy, Legacy, succeeds, there is going to be a nano-plague that wipes out the galaxy. Likewise, the cardboard henchlings that are doing her bidding -- what do they hope to get out of it. She doesn't even bother to lie in front of them.
So, I didn't feel there was good motivation for the bad guys. That's a minor quibble, though, which is why I only took away one star.

Like I said, I look forward to reading the rest of the series. This is great stuff.

[Pat MacEwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

In general, I enjoy space opera. Really, I wanted to enjoy this book a whole lot more than I did. It has a lots of surprising ideas and the plot evolves out of some I've never seen before, but the characters felt like snarky cartoons. Honestly, you could start (and stop) with the arch villain - Raven Kaligara. So sorry but 'psycho-bitch' is a tag, not a character. We're told over and over again how homicidal she is, how insane, how brilliant in spite of that, and not one flinkin' word about why. The good guys don't get a whole lot more. This is your basic heist plotline at work, and the stakes can hardly get any higher, involving as they do the fate of the galaxy and maybe the universe. But I can't tell you a single thing about any of them that is more than skin-deep, and sometimes not even that much. So the convolutions involving the Legacy (which come off like a highly repetitive video game without any sign of a beating heart) wound up frustrating me in spite of some ingenious plot twists to do with alternate time lines, biotech, and the cat-herding of endless variations on each of these shallow-as-spit so-called "characters." A bunch of them ended up dead, and I couldn't care less.

[Jojo · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book! Very satisfying read!

i initially hesitated to start this book after reading some of the reviews here but glad I decided to pick it up at the library.

It was great rootin' tootin' space opera with multiple universes, time bubbles, advanced weapons & technologies, lost alien races and treasure hunting, all written very creatively. The parts with the miniature universe reminded me of Peter F Hamilton's Void books.

It was good, interesting storytelling that kept moving forward to a satisfying ending and kept me engrossed. This isn't something that I can say about a lot of books. What more could you want? How a writer can keep all the pieces of a very complex story like this together is beyond me but props for being able to do so.

It did take a while to understand what was going on and start bringing the story pieces together in my mind but my only real annoyance was the Scottish English from the chief character. That was unnecessary.

I am definitely going to check out the author's other books.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5.

[Sara Hollingsworth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a strange and interesting read. I'm not sure if I would give it 3 stars truthfully, more like a 2 1/2 star experience, but I enjoyed it enough to round up my assessment to a solid 3. I'm not sure if I would have liked this more if I had read the other books in the universe. This book is technically part of a universe, though a stand alone. Space opera novels tend to be hit or miss for me in general. I love fantasy of all kinds with magic and creatures and swords and nobles. Space though is sometimes to crazy for me to wrap my head around. Too much technobabble and space things that tend to be difficult for me to understand and therefore enjoy. I keep trying though cause I like to find enjoyable space adventures. This one is not one of my favorites, but it did a passable job of being entertaining.

[Nik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. It starts out like a run of the mill mercenary space romp but quickly introduces some very novel concepts and unique immersive environments. It felt like it was written for a more modern generation than most SciFi with the worlds inside the AI construct reminding me of the hours I spent exploring adventure games in my younger days. The characters trapped inside this AI world however are working alongside their real life counterparts on the outside to prevent the fall of the galaxy to AI invasion.

I tend to forget a lot of books not long after I have read them but every now and then I come across a novel a little different, I think this one will stick in my memory for some time.

[Garrie Fletcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the most fun I’ve had reading in ages. Splintered Suns is a fast paced, wise-cracking yomp through a far future on the brink of total destruction. This is not hard sci-fi, so don’t get your pants in a twist about the science of it all, just sit back and enjoy it.

This is very much in the same vein as Blake’s 7, Serenity, Star Wars etc where action and the thrust and parry of exchanges take precedence over the plausibility of it all. I felt the characters and world building were top notch and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Dan Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really what I'd expected to be honest, after reading the back cover, which is a shame.

Some sections of the book appeared to be a bit random when describing some scenes which made me question whether I'd missed a page.

It got very computer wordy towards the end which to me didn't make much sense and appeared to just be words bashed together which interrupted the flow.

I felt the last 180 pages were a bot of a slog.

[William Walter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The interwoven story lines occurring in variously separate time-space locales was at times confused and strained credibility in my humble estimation; was glad when the story finished. Not sure I am up for any more like it, though.

[Fern Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very disappointing, difficult to follow, not much plot, characters are flat. Perhaps Mr. Cobley needs to re-learn how to write, he has had too much success and is now just churning out works without quality? A virtual world isn't the best venue for a good story.

[Selby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Got through this but it dragged a little. Some interesting plays in terms of the environment, and personalities. At the end I didn’t really engage with the characters though. Amiable rogues in space

[Bernie Marinacis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mike Cobley outdid himself!

[Gentlemanvillain · Rating 2 out of 5]

It reads like a pirate swashbuckler and evokes those tropes. Ain't bad, ain't great.

[Nick Ray · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring and badly written. DNF

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice space opera!
Second book with Captain Pike.

[Slarti Fartfast · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't get past the first two pages. This guy just can't write; ponderous, overblown dialogue so clumsy it stops you in your tracks. enough said.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the switch from characters (from the first three books) is unexpected this is a great tale and under-rated. Easily a 4.5 for space opera and great ideas. Highly recommend the entire series.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Splintered Suns is another novel from Cobley in his Humanity's Fire universe, and follows the same cast of characters from the previous installment, Ancestral Machines, though can be read as a stand-alone. The plot is fun and interesting, though there is a fair amount of technobabble that is often not explained. The plot also switches back and forth between threads, which at first is an interesting style to bring out the larger story, but continues to throw new information seemingly out of nowhere. The charcaters are mostly along for the ride here than driving the plot themselves because of these outside sources, and while the end is somewhat satisfying, it's very late in the day before we really understand what the whole plot is about. Thorpe's narration is great, adding life to the characters and relly making me want to listen along until the end when I may have stalled if I was sitting down reading it myself.

[Erin]

This book got off to a rollicking start, and unfortunately, suffered as a result. Starting the story fast placed and plot driven is great when the audience can easily get a grip on the world and the characters, but in this case, neither was possible. I spent the first quarter of this book head reeling, trying to keep the characters straight and get a grip on the setting - and even after that I felt I didn’t have a good handle on it. Even a page or two of exposition in the first or second chapter would have made all the difference. As it was, I found myself getting easily distracted and putting this book down, because I don’t enjoy feeling confused.


Once you get past that though, there are some great and innovative storylines and devices in this book. I enjoyed the light romance between two of the main characters, and I enjoyed the AIs. Some parts of the storyline were very technical with insufficient reference points or touchstones, so I mostly finished this book for the sake of my reading challenge, and not out of any desire to keep reading it.

[Simon Cox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good quality SF the characters did not really grad me enough to make it really good.