Shroud

4/5. Our narrator, vassal of a future space exploring hell corporate, tells the story of how she survived many days on the surface of a mysterious and deeply hostile moon, populated by inexplicable and frightening life forms. Then things get weirder.

Good standalone scifi with a long section of survival horror. This makes an interesting companion to Alien Clay, another recent book of his. Both are about humans who are powerless within an oppressive and unfair human system, and how they encounter terrifying alien life, and how those aliens embody another way of being sentient in a radical departure from the human way, and what that illuminates. The two books come at that story from very different angles, but to interesting effect alone and together.

Content notes: Death, corporate dehumanization, the existential horror of alien consciousness

Service Model

4/5. A robot butler discovers that he has, to his surprise, murdered his master. This sends him on a journey out of a secluded estate and into an apocalyptic landscape.

I think Tchaikovsky is in something of an experimental period. There’s just been a lot of playing with styles, modes, voices. This one seems to be a bit controversial, but did land with me. Other reviewers have reached immediately for Murderbot as a foil; I think yes, not wrong, but Azimov is more right.

What I liked about this was how it subverted my expectations for this kind of story – a hero’s journey for a robot who does not credit itself with personhood. This book is kind of about not being that, and a lot about what work is, and what fulfillment is, and a lot a lot about the “AI revolution,” definitely in skeptical quotes here. It’s topical without being didactic, farcical without annoying me (imagine that), and quite accomplished as a stylistic piece. Not everyone will like it, but I did.

3/5. Creepy novella about an astronaut lost in a big not-so-dumb object – a sort of alien labyrinth thing populated by monsters, but who are the monsters really, you know the sort of thing. The twist here is signaled well in advance, but it’ supposed to be. The satisfaction is in getting there. Good at what it’s doing, but I do need to remember that I just don’t find nine out of ten original novellas satisfying, and this is not in the 10%, even though it’s Tchaikovsky, and I trust him a lot at this point. It’s just not the length my brain is regulated to or something.

Content notes: So much violence. Cannibalism.

Children of Memory

4/5. Follows the spiders one and the octopods one. This is sort of the corvids one – there are intelligent corvids who think in paired minds doing different corvid tasks – but also the story of an expedition to a world colonized by a struggling remnant of humanity.

Ah, this is the good shit. I think one reason this series has broken out so well is that it delivers what so many of us want in good science fiction: some chewy thinking about different states of being and embodiment, some deep plunges into the strange waters of alien cognition, and also timey-wimey nonsense.

Specific to that first thing on different states of being, man what a deck he’s playing with here. I’d spoil some of the twists here if I ticked through all of the options, but you have your corvids, your ancient artificial intelligence faintly inhabited by a human ghost echo, some uplifted spiders, an uplifted octopus, a microscopic alien hive mind inhabiting a donated replicant human body, etc. And what he does so well is not only portray these states of being, not only do so interestingly (the corvids claim not to be sentient and are not sure humans are either, and honestly their argument isn’t bad), but he does all that without a thumb on the scale. Most scifi that is about aliens in this way gets squeamish at some point, starts retreating back into the shell of original flavor humanity. Most of the time this kind of scifi says, implicitly if not out loud, that all of this is well and good but we all know what people look like and those people are (able-bodied) humans. Tchaikovsky doesn’t do that, basically ever, and it’s pretty great. And there is a particular development at the end of this book on this subject, adding yet another way of coming into thinking being, that is just perfect.

Content notes: Mob violence, grief.

Someday All This Will be Yours (couldn't easily find a listing for this one, I got it recorded from the National Library Service)

2/5. After finishing Memory I was in the mood for more really good chewy scifi, so I grabbed this time travel novella by him. The description is about the lone survivor of the time war setting up his home at what he thinks of as the end of time, only to discover there is a future after all. That’s broadly true, but really this is about a sociopath being a sociopath and then meeting another sociopath to hook up with. It has a funny, breezy tone, and I can see circumstances where this would have landed right with me, but at this particular moment it absolutely did not scratch the chewy scifi itch I was having. I will say that this novella is doing something funny/unusual with time travel and childbearing/being childfree that I enjoyed conceptually, even though the story itself was not what I wanted.

Content notes: Lots of murder, recollections of futuristic war

The 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.

Children of Time and Children of Ruin

3/5. I had to look up the titles of these books because I've been calling them They're Good Spiders Brent, and Also They're Pretty Great Octopuses Brent.

Far future scifi about the tiny surviving remnant of humanity encountering the various spider/octopus space civilizations their forefathers created back when humanity had the technology to deploy an uplift virus. Charming, and surprised me with complexity in places I wasn't expecting it. I'd be all yes, yes, details of spider societal development and then the book would be like but also! Musings on interspecies communication and reaching across the void and remaking ourselves in a better image.

One thing I appreciated about these books is how little angst they have about what it means to be human. You know, am I still me if I've taken on a virus that changes how I interact with aliens? Am I still human if I'm a copy of a computer program ghosted from a copy of a personality taken from a woman while she died? I know I've said this before, but scifi in general has this obsession with angsting over that sort of thing, and I find it obnoxious at best, toxic at worst. It all springs from a narrow, restrictive idea of what human is supposed to be, and it's really easy to see how a lot of this is first cousin to disability anxiety. But anyway, in these books, people change, themselves and each other. Entire species rewrite themselves. And that's just what happens, warts and all.