The Doors of Eden

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Interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Shadow of the Apt series". www.londoncalling.com . Retrieved 23 January 2019. Lastly, do remember that this is Tchaikovsky’s book, you might as well prepare yourself to meet terrifying creatures. And spiders. Then I'm going to throw in some bigot character just for the hell of it because why not. Does it really do anything for the plot? Nah. But doesn't your blood just boil when bigots do/say/ act (in) disgustingly bigot ways?

Special thanks to my Patrons on Patreon for giving me extra support towards my passion for reading and reviewing! It is an extraordinarily long book that doesn't feel long at all, which says something for Tchaikovsky's ability to balance those edges with plotting. I found myself remembering the sympathetic spiders and irritating humans in Children of Time and wondered if he was making a similar point here. There's also dinosaurs, evolution, biology and more. The interludes of the book tell us about all sorts of changing cultures and creatures throughout the ages, and eventually we see how these research interludes connect into the overall plot too. Finally there’s the inane non-science. I’m not a scientist. Hell, I’m not even good at science. I know enough to make me think science fiction solutions sound reasonable even when they’re probably not. And I don’t expect strong science in science fiction. Science fiction, to me, is all about exploring about how big changes would affect the world that people live in. Small changes can lead to butterfly effects that might not occur to you but seem natural once you think about it. But this book is nothing but tautologies. One character is the multiverse’s greatest mathematician and she’s doing science and math fix problems. That’s not a summary, that’s the complete extent of the information we’re provided. When other characters talk to her she says things like “Well I used math to talk to the aliens.” “I’m trying to fix the problem of the sun exploding with math, but the math of science is very hard math.” I tried doing a search for “math” in my Kindle Web Reader so I could pull some direct quotes but it’s not enabled for searching yet. Might update this later. Most of the time it’s as bad as a character saying “The problem with space travel is you can’t go faster than light. But we did math on some light and found out with math we could mathematically go faster than light.” None of this is helped by the fact that literally every time the mathematician is in a scene they, or someone else, use the word “math” at least once. Usually in conjunction with “science.” I don’t know if that’s true earlier in the book, but I got the suspicion late into the novel and it held true. It’s especially baffling since the author clearly knows more about science than I do. The sections on the parallel earths had science I didn’t know before, and I felt like I learned some things. It’s just that there are vast sections that are just “doing the science!” The lesson here is that the Earth doesn’t care; that bad things happen; that it could so easily have been us.”Lee was devastated, not knowing what had happened to her friend. She thought her lost forever, until four years later she receives a phone call from her friend asking for a meeting. While this is happening a top British scientist, Dr. Kay Khan, has recently begun to theorize there are not only multiple realities, but the fabric between them is wearing down resulting in holes allowing ‘others’ to slip through.

The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.As they are drawn into a mystery surrounding top physicist Kay Amal Khan the agents find their investigation going beyond the scope of anything they could ever have imagined. Unlike the other characters, these are the two outsiders, and it’s through their experiences, their feelings that the reader is able to truly feel the fascination, wonder and at times horror of what is happening. There is no review that can prepare you for that aspect of this book; you will come out with more questions than answers. With more thoughts regarding the world we live in and the possibilities of science than you ever thought possible.