Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky (The Final Architecture, Book Two)
I didn’t enjoy this as much as the trilogy’s first book — 2021’s Shards of Earth — mainly because it suffered from being the middle book. A good deal of Eyes of the Void felt like Tchaikovsky was just biding his time and shuffling things around in preparation for the third book, Lords of Uncreation. As such, it lacked some of the urgency and momentum that I enjoyed so much in Shards of Earth. That said, the book’s fourth and final section — “Criccieth’s Hell” — ended it on a strong note, with Tchaikovsky once again unleashing his creative prose to describe the horrors of the galaxy’s most inhospitable planet as well as the unsettling discoveries that Idris Telemmier makes while plumbing the depths of “unspace” (the bizarre layer of (un)reality lurking just beneath real space) for clues on how to stop the world-destroying Architects.