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bickleyhouse 's review for:
The Doors of Eden
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
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.