The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Jul. 19th, 2021 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Doors of Eden
3/5. Adrian Tchaikovsky had a whole bunch of ideas about how intelligence could have arisen in alternate creatures over many alternate earths, and then – I am just guessing here – he got really mad about Brexit, so he took all those alternate animal intelligence ideas and slapped a story about interdimensional travel over them.
Not his best, but enjoyable in places. Books written when you're really mad about something can either be gripping or kind of awkward and embarrassing. This one is rather reductive – the villain is a cartoon racist homophobe who wants to preserve the "real England," and the ultimate resolution is pinned to a sort of "we have to all work together in our differences guys!" thing. It's a framing that I would find juvenile under most circumstances, but here it bothered me specifically because it turns the queer identities here (a transwoman scientist and two other queer women) into sort of . . . counters on a game board, and not so much parts of themselves. It's diversity to make a point about how diversity is important, which, okay, I guess, but can't they just be queer and trans?
That said, as usual, he has cool ideas about how other species might develop intelligence, and how their earths would differ.
Content notes: The villain deadnames the transwoman, misgenders her, and at one point forces her into male dress. The book knows this is bad. The villain is also a racist with Nazi leanings.
3/5. Adrian Tchaikovsky had a whole bunch of ideas about how intelligence could have arisen in alternate creatures over many alternate earths, and then – I am just guessing here – he got really mad about Brexit, so he took all those alternate animal intelligence ideas and slapped a story about interdimensional travel over them.
Not his best, but enjoyable in places. Books written when you're really mad about something can either be gripping or kind of awkward and embarrassing. This one is rather reductive – the villain is a cartoon racist homophobe who wants to preserve the "real England," and the ultimate resolution is pinned to a sort of "we have to all work together in our differences guys!" thing. It's a framing that I would find juvenile under most circumstances, but here it bothered me specifically because it turns the queer identities here (a transwoman scientist and two other queer women) into sort of . . . counters on a game board, and not so much parts of themselves. It's diversity to make a point about how diversity is important, which, okay, I guess, but can't they just be queer and trans?
That said, as usual, he has cool ideas about how other species might develop intelligence, and how their earths would differ.
Content notes: The villain deadnames the transwoman, misgenders her, and at one point forces her into male dress. The book knows this is bad. The villain is also a racist with Nazi leanings.