Michael Cobley’s new space opera hits the launchpad, and I must confess that intitially I was seriously worried it was going to crash and burn: the Prologue, a brief taster of the Swarm War that nearly caused the extinction of the human race, is overblown and rather hackneyed, with a strong echo of Starship Troopers (the film, not the book). Moving beyond that, the initial setup was so strongly reminiscent of Ken McLeod’s excellent Cosmonaut Keep that for a little while I couldn’t get past it – descendants of Earth settlers, living on a new world, in an co-operative alliance with an enigmatic race of indigenous aliens, even the use of airships to get around, all seemed vividly familiar. HOWEVER, my persistence was rewarded – once Cobley gets in to his stride, this is a compelling and impressive book, and one that I really enjoyed.

The people of Darien arrived on their world in full flight from the Swarm War, one of only three colony ships launched as humanity’s last hope. The settlers, a mix of Scots, Scandinavians and Russians, exist peacefully with the Uvovo, a mysterious alien species who dwell on the forest moon (no, they’re nothing like Ewoks) and have an enigmatic, symbiotic relationship with the forest they call Segrana. When a spaceship from the Earth arrives, revealing that the human race survived the Swarm War, the people of Darien have to rapidly assimilate a new reality – Earth has powerful allies, the Sendrukans, and they’re very interested in Darien for reasons dating back to an ancient conflict between immensely powerful forces.

The tale is told, third-person, by following a number of protagonists – mostly human, but also several Uvovo. Keeping the ‘chapters’ for each character relatively short enables Cobley to maintain a healthy pace, and the story seldom gets bogged down. A little way in to the book, we are introduced to the descendants of one of the other two colony ships, who have found themselves virtually enslaved by another race of aliens – and we follow Kao Chih’s adventures as he tries to link up with the colonists on Darien and explain the awful reality of the what the arrival of the Sendrukans and their Earth allies might mean.

There are many interesting ideas in Seeds of Earth – the idea that the dividing line between the sides clearly lining up for another galaxy-spanning ding-dong will be their attitudes towards Artifical Intelligences, and the clear implication that the AIs used by the Sendrukans and their human allies can control their companions; the use of multiple levels of hyperspace to create a kind of intergalactic underworld; and the multi-part lifecycyle of the Uvovo, to name a few. This is not hard SF though, and any kind of dalliance with escape velocities, red shift and that pesky business of relativity is firmly avoided, which is to the benefit of the book’s momentum.

While there are a number of aspects of Seeds of Earth that strongly evoked other space opera writers – Iain M. Banks, Ken McLeod and Peter F. Hamilton – this is still a really good, enjoyable and compelling book, written with verve and more than a little humour, which allows it to transcend its influences and overcome its weaknesses. I confess I can’t wait for the next one in the series.

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