I should probably start by pointing out that this is not a review, per se -- I've not read the whole book, just the first chapter or so: enough of it to be intrigued and for a couple of niggles to leap out at me. I may very well not be doing it justice.

Seeds of Earth is the first book in a trilogy entitled Humanity's Fire, and the backstory and bits of plot I've encountered so far live up to the grandiose name. The prologue lays this out: a century or so from now, Earth makes first contact with an alien race. Unfortunately, they're not exactly friendly. While the Tyranids Swarmers make their inexorable way closer to our home planet, Earth desperately builds and launches three colony ships and fires them out into space on random courses, to find habitable planets and keep humanity alive.

So far, so good. While it's a combination I haven't seen in a little while, ravenous alien invaders and desperately launched colony ships are both well-rehearsed SF chestnuts, and Cobley uses them competently if not especially originally.

Next stop: Darien, the verdant world reached by the colony ship Hyperion and now home to a human colony which has learned to live in peace with the indigenous intelligent race, the "scholarly and enigmatic" Uvovo. (The Uvovo mostly live in a world-girdling, somehow mystical forest. They're usually somewhat smaller and slighter than humans. Elves, anyone?). Darien's government has been contacted by Earth -- which, apparently, was helped by another race of aliens and managed to beat back the Swarmers. The two groups of humans have different views on AI technology, and different paths of cultural evolution, so there might be some interesting explorations of those topics.

Except for one thing: each of the colony ships, apparently, was filled with a mix of peoples that would be representative of the species as well as culturally complementary, thus likely to be able to live and work together. A nice idea, I thought, but tricky to pull off. Does Cobley do it? Well, no. At least, not so far. The Hyperion, apparently, was filled with Russians, Scandinavians, and... Scots.

Now, apart from the fact that all these peoples are ethnically somewhat similar and not exactly representative of the species^[1], they're also a rather random lumping-together of various cultural groups. My problem here is one of granularity -- if you are going to consider the Scots a separate cultural grouping, then why are the Danes, various regional Swedes, Finns, and Bokmål- and Nynorsk-speaking Norwegians all jammed together as "Scandinavians"?

According to Wikipedia, Cobley is Scottish, so this singling out of the Scots is understandable, if somewhat reminiscent of the self-insertion which is common in fanfic. (Especially since the people who seem to be on a fast-track to saving their people and culture (and, as a side note, probably living happily ever after together) are both Scottish-ethnic humans).

Seeds of Earth has been praised for its culturally diverse storytelling and the fact that characters aren't thinly veiled Americans with funny names. And admittedly, so far, I haven't seen many of them. I have to give kudos to Cobley for trying -- he does envision Darien as a culturally integrated and yet interestingly diverse place (within its parameters of 'diversity'), but I'm not sure I'll be impressed with an exploration of different human cultures, AIs, and their integration with aliens if the author's idea of existing human diversity is so shallow.

That having been said, I can get down off my high horse and say that so far it does look interesting, much like Anderson's Saga of Seven Suns but more concise and better characterized. So, in other words, quite a good ol' space opera, and I'm probably going to read the rest of it once there's more of the trilogy to follow.

^{[1]: How much do you want to bet that out of the three colony ships (Hyperion, Forrestal, and Tenebrosa) only the one with a non-Anglo-American name is going to be stuffed to the brim with non-white ethnicities?}