This is more a retrospective than a review, since it’s been over two years since I finished the final volume in the Orphans trilogy by Sean Williams and Shane Dix. (And I talk about the ending too if you haven’t read it and care about spoilers.)
For me it stands at the peak of the collaboration by these two authors*, simply because after over two years I’m still thinking about what happened in the end. Most of the time I don’t remember what I read two months ago let alone two years, but I remember the Orphans Trilogy.
It has the same epic scope and imaginative detail as the Evergence trilogy. But the Hamlet-like “everyone dies” ending of Evergence always seemed rushed and incomplete to me, a somewhat unsatisfying ending to an otherwise impressive read.
Like the Evergence trilogy (but unlike the Star Wars novels by the same authors), Orphans is filtered through the eyes of a few central characters. The Star Wars novels left me gasping for air as the narrative jumped between places and people and had so many points of view that they washed each other out.
While the story in the Orphans trilogy is “about” the characters and their struggle to survive a universe populated with ultra-powerful and enigmatic entities, it’s the ending of Orphans that leaves its mark: a kind of “WTF?” feeling that opens itself to analysis again and again.
Williams and Dix play with time’s arrow and the perspective of time. An advanced species rains destruction down upon people who experience time as running forwards. But if you happened to experience time backwards, that same advanced species could be seen as creators.
(If I had to guess, I’d say that Sean Williams in particular has a soft spot for “reversal of time”, since he also uses the concept in his Books of the Cataclysm series.)
I don’t pretend to understand entirely the effects on time that occur at the end of the Orphans trilogy, but I know I like trying to work out the connotations of it. It has stuck in my mind where so much else seeps through like wine through the kidneys.
In a way, the Orphans trilogy provides an answer to the age old riddle: which came first, the chicken or the egg? In terms of these novels, the riddle would be “which came first, the spinners or the starfish?”
The answer? It depends on how you define “first”.
* Since drafting this piece on the Orphans trilogy, I’ve read the first book in the Geodesica series. Although it’s too soon to tell if a new peak has been discovered, it looks good so far.