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A review by hank
The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky
4.0
I am very pleased that I liked this book. This is my third Tchaikovsky book and sort of my first test to see if I like Tchaikovsky or if I just like his Children of Time series. Fortunately for me it was great. Perhaps not as great as Children of Time but still very good. Tchaikovsky returns again to his main theme of "What if..." In this case, instead of exploring if one or two species evolving intelligence along side or with the help of humans, he explores the idea of completely separate (until now) Earths with different evolution and paths to intelligence.
One of the things that drew me as a kid and still continues to fascinate is the idea of other worlds just waiting to be explored. Portal type fantasies have always been one way to do this but those never fully captured my sense of exploration. Getting in a space ship and traveling to a different planet with different "things" always hit my sweet spot. Doors of Eden is a compromise between those two that completely works for me. Like one of the characters in the book, Mal, I love the options in the novel and shuddered at the thought of being limited to only one and Tchaikovsky, as usual, does an awesome job of setting up believable and very different Earths.
Themes of sacrifice, bigotry, societal power structures all found their way into the narrative and made my mind wander off thinking about environmental impacts on societal structure and then thinking about why civilizations found in our Earth's temperate zone ended up being more successful and so on. Always a sign of a good book for me if it opens up doors of thought in my own head.
I rounded half a star down because I have been bugged about too obvious and bigoted antagonists lately, this one being exactly that without much dimension to his evil plots although I did like the mostly failed moral struggle of the henchman.
One of the things that drew me as a kid and still continues to fascinate is the idea of other worlds just waiting to be explored. Portal type fantasies have always been one way to do this but those never fully captured my sense of exploration. Getting in a space ship and traveling to a different planet with different "things" always hit my sweet spot. Doors of Eden is a compromise between those two that completely works for me. Like one of the characters in the book, Mal, I love the options in the novel and shuddered at the thought of being limited to only one and Tchaikovsky, as usual, does an awesome job of setting up believable and very different Earths.
Themes of sacrifice, bigotry, societal power structures all found their way into the narrative and made my mind wander off thinking about environmental impacts on societal structure and then thinking about why civilizations found in our Earth's temperate zone ended up being more successful and so on. Always a sign of a good book for me if it opens up doors of thought in my own head.
I rounded half a star down because I have been bugged about too obvious and bigoted antagonists lately, this one being exactly that without much dimension to his evil plots although I did like the mostly failed moral struggle of the henchman.