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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
The Doors of Eden is just one of those books that will blow your mind to freaking shreds! If I had one thought at the end of reading this tome, that was, that my teeny tiny brain just pales into comparison with some of the greatest minds in our world. I was in awe; I was in heaven but most of all that science fiction itch was scratched to the bone! If you haven’t read any of Adrian Tchaikovsky, have you been sitting underneath a freaking rock? He has written an immense number of books but ashamedly I haven’t read any of the others, rectifying that immediately.
Let it be known that I have never read anything like this!
Science fiction is not a genre that I have dipped my toes into very often. I guess I feel intimated by it. The technical jargon, the character names, the trajectory of the plot. I’ve DNF’d more than I’d care to admit. I’ve never found my glue, that passion to read more in the genre…until I discovered The Doors of Eden. Adrian Tchaikovsky is the living and breathing proof that the human imagination can span the galaxies. He has pushed the boundaries both with research and a narrative that will imprint itself in our skies.
The story introduces us to Lee and Mal, lovers and cryptid hunters. Their current mission is to go searching for The Birdmen on Bodmin Moor. How is it possible that only one girl can come back? How can one girl just vanish into thin air? Four years later, in the current timeline, Lee receives a call from Mal. Why is she making contact now, when Lee has painstakingly brought herself to believe that Mal was dead? If the Doors of Eden do one thing well, then that’s, teasing the reader into asking question after question, and really these questions are a drop in an excessively big ocean.
I thought I knew what I was getting into before I started this story but really, in brilliant Jon Snow fashion – I knew nothing! This story had me all in. All the bets were off. I did wonder if Tchaikovsky has the secret ingredient into making his stories into mind blowing works of art. The narrative and the plot development were carried out with laser precision. The author had an uncanny ability to tap into our deepest desires and lay them bare for all to see. He knows how human nature evolves and he made us question why we are the way we are.
Tchaikovsky gave me everything that I didn’t know that I needed in a science fiction novel. Parallel worlds. Inter-dimensional creatures. Cracks in the universe. Power struggles. The author isn’t frightened of throwing punch after punch and giving you one more just for good measure. The emotion, the connections but above all the coming together to preserve this universe, good or bad. The diversity of themes running through it only strengthened the story and gave us a multi-layered story, science and evolution being at its core.
The Doors of Eden is at its centre a story but love and our need to preserve our history. Each character, although different, are multi-faceted but strangely normal and that’s what I got onboard with instantaneously. I fell in love with out much the author highlighted that nothing is black and white. The author started with a blank canvas but ended up with Edvard Munch’s Scream masterpiece. No apologies and no mercy.
Let it be known that I have never read anything like this!
Science fiction is not a genre that I have dipped my toes into very often. I guess I feel intimated by it. The technical jargon, the character names, the trajectory of the plot. I’ve DNF’d more than I’d care to admit. I’ve never found my glue, that passion to read more in the genre…until I discovered The Doors of Eden. Adrian Tchaikovsky is the living and breathing proof that the human imagination can span the galaxies. He has pushed the boundaries both with research and a narrative that will imprint itself in our skies.
The story introduces us to Lee and Mal, lovers and cryptid hunters. Their current mission is to go searching for The Birdmen on Bodmin Moor. How is it possible that only one girl can come back? How can one girl just vanish into thin air? Four years later, in the current timeline, Lee receives a call from Mal. Why is she making contact now, when Lee has painstakingly brought herself to believe that Mal was dead? If the Doors of Eden do one thing well, then that’s, teasing the reader into asking question after question, and really these questions are a drop in an excessively big ocean.
I thought I knew what I was getting into before I started this story but really, in brilliant Jon Snow fashion – I knew nothing! This story had me all in. All the bets were off. I did wonder if Tchaikovsky has the secret ingredient into making his stories into mind blowing works of art. The narrative and the plot development were carried out with laser precision. The author had an uncanny ability to tap into our deepest desires and lay them bare for all to see. He knows how human nature evolves and he made us question why we are the way we are.
Tchaikovsky gave me everything that I didn’t know that I needed in a science fiction novel. Parallel worlds. Inter-dimensional creatures. Cracks in the universe. Power struggles. The author isn’t frightened of throwing punch after punch and giving you one more just for good measure. The emotion, the connections but above all the coming together to preserve this universe, good or bad. The diversity of themes running through it only strengthened the story and gave us a multi-layered story, science and evolution being at its core.
The Doors of Eden is at its centre a story but love and our need to preserve our history. Each character, although different, are multi-faceted but strangely normal and that’s what I got onboard with instantaneously. I fell in love with out much the author highlighted that nothing is black and white. The author started with a blank canvas but ended up with Edvard Munch’s Scream masterpiece. No apologies and no mercy.
adventurous
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
fast-paced
adventurous
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
what an amazing ride!
i loved the characters and the imagination of the world/worlds and its evolutions. slightly confusing and weird but exactly how i like it. thought i was in a slump before but thats exactly what i needed after a tense epic fantasy novel i read prior.
thrilling from start ot finish.
captivating scenery and witty characters - what a great mix. makes you think what could be out there and if it were possible at times.
We are all children of Earth
i loved the characters and the imagination of the world/worlds and its evolutions. slightly confusing and weird but exactly how i like it. thought i was in a slump before but thats exactly what i needed after a tense epic fantasy novel i read prior.
thrilling from start ot finish.
captivating scenery and witty characters - what a great mix. makes you think what could be out there and if it were possible at times.
We are all children of Earth
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
informative
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
hopeful
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is my first book by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I kept seeing his name while shelving books at the library, so I finally decided to check one out.
I thought Blake Crouch's Dark Matter was mind-bending. Wow.
I was sucked into this one almost immediately, as Mal and Lee set out to look for the supposedly mythical cryptid that had appeared on Bodmin Moor. They found what they were looking for, and much, much more. The blurb on the book tells us that only one of the two came back, but that is barely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Adrian Tchaikovsky has one of the most vivid imaginations that I have ever read. In this book, the world is about to end. And not just our world. All of them. All of the seemingly infinite alternate earths are about to end because something has gone very wrong, somewhere. And when Mal shows up four years after she disappeared on Bodmin Moor, to contact Lee, Lee, then gets sucked into the story.
The premise here is that in each of the many alternate earths, a different species evolved as the primary intelligence. It was only humans in one of them. There were neanderthal-like creatures, rat-people, trilobites, and even fungus. There are excerpts from a fictional textbook between chapters that sort of explains the different species that evolved.
Because of cracks in the worlds, many of the species were able to get together to try to solve the problem and save the worlds. And of course, there is a villain, in the person of Daniel Rove, a would-be Nazi-like person who is only interested in saving the human world. He has been working with the rat scientist (who is only known as "Dr. Rat"), but when Dr. Kay Amal Khan shows up, the human scientist who is brilliant at maths, Rove sets out to kidnap her to recruit her to his cause.
I literally sat in amazement as I read this book, astonished at the imagination of Tchaikovsky. There were times when I know that my mouth was hanging open as I read. Did I understand it all? Heck no! But that didn't keep me from enjoying it immensely, so much so that I stayed up way too late, last night, just to finish the story.
There were numerous shout-outs to other tales in Adrian's work. The first one that I noticed was on page 162 (of my edition), when an operation of the local law enforcement was called "Glassknife II: The Search for Khan." I could be wrong, but this is a pretty obvious shout-out to Star Trek. On page 482, one of the characters says, "The ultimate answer is . . . forty-two." This got quite a laugh from me. IYKYK. There are multiple references to Narnia, as well.
Late in the book, probably three-fourths of the way through, there are suddenly multiple, simultaneous timelines going on. At one point, I thought the book had a typo, because a paragraph was repeated verbatim. But then I realized that everything that came after that paragraph happened differently than it did before. This occurred at least three times, after which the story suddenly appeared to be going in reverse! (I started having flashbacks of House of Leaves!)
There was a line on page 272 that I really liked. I'm not giving any backstory, but it said, "Alison sat back and let the universe come to her." In context, this was a very cool line.
Finally, the last thing involves a speech by one of the neanderthal-like sentient beings that was helping in the quest to save the worlds. He was critiquing the human world, and rightfully so. I won't quote the entire paragraph, but he said, "You are gullible. Surrounded by people you don't know, with your leaders even less knowable, and you are gullible. Someone says a thing to you strongly enough, you believe them. You take confidence for truth. We don't do that. We are slower than you, because of that. . . . You let people with strong words tell you what the truth is. Kings, emperors, tyrants. You are about the many for the few, for the one. IN our branch, you learn what you can do for your family and your neighbors."
I'm going to be thinking about this book for a long time to come.
I'm also going to be reading more Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I thought Blake Crouch's Dark Matter was mind-bending. Wow.
I was sucked into this one almost immediately, as Mal and Lee set out to look for the supposedly mythical cryptid that had appeared on Bodmin Moor. They found what they were looking for, and much, much more. The blurb on the book tells us that only one of the two came back, but that is barely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Adrian Tchaikovsky has one of the most vivid imaginations that I have ever read. In this book, the world is about to end. And not just our world. All of them. All of the seemingly infinite alternate earths are about to end because something has gone very wrong, somewhere. And when Mal shows up four years after she disappeared on Bodmin Moor, to contact Lee, Lee, then gets sucked into the story.
The premise here is that in each of the many alternate earths, a different species evolved as the primary intelligence. It was only humans in one of them. There were neanderthal-like creatures, rat-people, trilobites, and even fungus. There are excerpts from a fictional textbook between chapters that sort of explains the different species that evolved.
Because of cracks in the worlds, many of the species were able to get together to try to solve the problem and save the worlds. And of course, there is a villain, in the person of Daniel Rove, a would-be Nazi-like person who is only interested in saving the human world. He has been working with the rat scientist (who is only known as "Dr. Rat"), but when Dr. Kay Amal Khan shows up, the human scientist who is brilliant at maths, Rove sets out to kidnap her to recruit her to his cause.
I literally sat in amazement as I read this book, astonished at the imagination of Tchaikovsky. There were times when I know that my mouth was hanging open as I read. Did I understand it all? Heck no! But that didn't keep me from enjoying it immensely, so much so that I stayed up way too late, last night, just to finish the story.
There were numerous shout-outs to other tales in Adrian's work. The first one that I noticed was on page 162 (of my edition), when an operation of the local law enforcement was called "Glassknife II: The Search for Khan." I could be wrong, but this is a pretty obvious shout-out to Star Trek. On page 482, one of the characters says, "The ultimate answer is . . . forty-two." This got quite a laugh from me. IYKYK. There are multiple references to Narnia, as well.
Late in the book, probably three-fourths of the way through, there are suddenly multiple, simultaneous timelines going on. At one point, I thought the book had a typo, because a paragraph was repeated verbatim. But then I realized that everything that came after that paragraph happened differently than it did before. This occurred at least three times, after which the story suddenly appeared to be going in reverse! (I started having flashbacks of House of Leaves!)
There was a line on page 272 that I really liked. I'm not giving any backstory, but it said, "Alison sat back and let the universe come to her." In context, this was a very cool line.
Finally, the last thing involves a speech by one of the neanderthal-like sentient beings that was helping in the quest to save the worlds. He was critiquing the human world, and rightfully so. I won't quote the entire paragraph, but he said, "You are gullible. Surrounded by people you don't know, with your leaders even less knowable, and you are gullible. Someone says a thing to you strongly enough, you believe them. You take confidence for truth. We don't do that. We are slower than you, because of that. . . . You let people with strong words tell you what the truth is. Kings, emperors, tyrants. You are about the many for the few, for the one. IN our branch, you learn what you can do for your family and your neighbors."
I'm going to be thinking about this book for a long time to come.
I'm also going to be reading more Adrian Tchaikovsky.