|
Post by martinw8686 on Jan 14, 2023 23:53:27 GMT
I've just bought Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky, just wondering if anyone had read any of his books and how they'd rate them. I thought Children of Time looked interesting, any good?
|
|
|
Post by Kestrel on Jan 15, 2023 4:48:42 GMT
I can answer that question, easily, provided you're very, very patient.
Seriously, though.... Tchaikovsky's been on my radar for a while, and I've used EreaderIQ to pick up some eBooks on sale. I haven't read any of 'em yet, but I've got Shards of Earth and Children of Time. IIRC they were recommended to me alongside Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, both of whom are now among my favorite (living) SF authors, so my expectations are pretty high.
Though my fiction backlog alone is around 150+ titles, so who knows when I'll get to 'em.
|
|
|
Post by martinw8686 on Jan 15, 2023 11:47:05 GMT
I can answer that question, easily, provided you're very, very patient. Seriously, though.... Tchaikovsky's been on my radar for a while, and I've used EreaderIQ to pick up some eBooks on sale. I haven't read any of 'em yet, but I've got Shards of Earth and Children of Time. IIRC they were recommended to me alongside Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, both of whom are now among my favorite (living) SF authors, so my expectations are pretty high. Though my fiction backlog alone is around 150+ titles, so who knows when I'll get to 'em. He's been on my radar for a while too, he's got quote the back catalogue so it's difficult to know where to start. I thought I'd read Cage of Souls first as it's stand alone, then move on to Children of Time. I'm always buying books for a rainy day, especially if I find myself in a decent second hand bookshop (heaven!), I managed to get about 15 Virgin New Adventures and several BBC Eighth Doctor books that I've only read a couple of, I think I've read The Burning, Casualties of War, Father Time, Eater of Wasps and the Timewrym series. I tend to go back to Doctor Who books after reading a few more lengthy novels, just finishing Dune and before that a couple of Stephen King epics. I'm interested to know what you think of Adrian Tchaikovsky but understand you may be some time getting through your backlog, the order I get through mine us quite random.
|
|
|
Post by Kestrel on Jan 16, 2023 7:50:51 GMT
Yeah, I'm pretty random in my approach, too. My casual reading is pretty much 100% on Kindle these days, so I just scroll through my list of unread "new books" and pick whatever strikes my fancy.
I know that I saw some reviews of one of Tchaikovsky's books that gave me a bit of pause, but overall it seems like he's tackling a bunch of really interesting/fun ideas. I'd like to pick up the "Empire of Black and Gold" book, too, someday soon-ish (I think that's another trilogy, because ****ing everything has to be a trilogy this century) as it sounds like a lot of fun. But, then, I've always had a soft-spot for insectoid aliens.
Like if the Zerg aren't your favorite Starcraft race, I don't know what to tell you.
|
|
|
Post by Kestrel on Feb 15, 2023 4:32:32 GMT
I've started reading Children of Time. Should have some concrete thoughts to share in a week or two. First impressions are... mixed.
|
|
|
Post by newt5996 on Feb 17, 2023 22:30:02 GMT
I actually just read and reviewed Children of Time. I loved it. Certainly not hard sci fi by any means but the spiders are fascinating and somehow the happy ending works when it really shouldn’t.
|
|
|
Post by martinw8686 on Feb 18, 2023 22:04:19 GMT
I'm 2/3s through Cage of Souls, really enjoying it so far.
|
|
|
Post by Kestrel on Feb 27, 2023 17:36:52 GMT
Finished Children of Time. I liked it well enough, a solid 7/10 -- entertaining, interesting enough to compel me to read further, but not something I'm ever likely to revisit.
I'm not sure how much of Tchaikovsky's style I can accurately extrapolate from just the one novel, so take what I'm about to say with a hefty grain of salt, but... Tchaikovsky seems pretty disinterested in people. Who and why are not questions he seems to care about -- more how and what. He doesn't seem to really understand how people think or act, or seem to want to try to understand that. This results -- here, at least -- in a very plot-driven narrative where the characters exist solely to propel the story further along.
This works well enough when he's writing about the Spiders -- they are, after all, quite alien to us -- but fully half the novel is told from Mason's perspective, and as such it is by far the weaker half.
I get the sense that Tchaikovsky really just wanted to get to the new "status quo" revealed in the final chapter, and the preceding story is basically just him trying to get there as quickly as possible, which results in many, shall we say... uninspired narrative choices. Points where the story could have veered off into more interesting directions but didn't because certain less interesting tropes were more efficient at getting us to that ending state.
So our antagonists wind up being insane people with no real character or personality beyond simply being mad. I don't really want to get into any spoilers here, so I think I'll leave it at that. But just, like, imagine for a second if Kern had actually been a decent person at first, slowly broken over the slow erosion of eons, rather than just a sociopathic misanthrope from the start.
Basically, a lot of narrative elements feel very contrived, or forced, because the story that the author is most interested in seems to be the one that takes place after this book.
Or at least that's the sense I get. God knows I've got plenty of little (and a few big) details I want to point at and interrogate, but ultimately I think what I want to say is that Tchaikovsky cares more about plot than character, and this is not an approach I'm fond of. I know "Big Idea" science fiction often doesn't do too well in the character department, but I don't think that Big Idea SF and character-driven stories are mutually exclusive, especially when one has as many pages to work with as Tchaikovsky does in Children of Time.
Hm... I hope I'm not coming across as too negative here. I liked the book, and I fully intend to read the next one -- and soon -- but I'm just... a bit disappointed in it. Because I didn't want to like the book, I wanted to love it. The whole fish-out-of-temporal-water thing that's at the heart of this story is one of my all-time favorite tropes, but it just... not executed very well here. There's just not enough to distinguish each era -- all we get are very shallow snapshots, really -- and there's too little personal connection w/ the characters for me to feel any real emotional attachment to any one time or place.
But given that Children of Time was apparently one of Tchaikovsky's earlier novels, I'm optimistic that he improves a bit with the subsequent stories. Still, though, I suspect readers who need characters they can sympathize with, or otherwise care about, to really get into a novel probably won't find a whole lot of reasons to read these books.
|
|
|
Post by Kestrel on Mar 4, 2023 21:30:09 GMT
So I've flung myself into Children of Ruin, and so far it's an enormous improvement across the board. It also retcons (or tries to retcon) some of the weaker elements of the first book, which is cool.
|
|