FATHER'S DAY FAST ONES: Two new Adrian Tchaikovsky novels, SHROUD and BEE SPEAKER

BEE SPEAKER (Dogs of War #3)
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
Head of Zeus—an AdAstra Book (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Arthur C. Clarke award winner, Adrian Tchaikovsky, comes the third instalment of the DOGS OF WAR science fiction series, a future where genetically engineered “Bioforms” have inherited not the Earth, but the Solar System.

The end of the world has been and gone.

There was no one great natural disaster, no all-consuming world war, no catastrophic pandemic. Only scores of storms, droughts, and selfish regional conflicts. Humanity was not granted a heroic end. Instead, it bled to death from a thousand cuts.

But where Earth fell apart, Mars pulled together. Engineered men and beasts, aided by Bees – an outlawed distributed intelligence—survived through co-operation, because there was simply no alternative.

Fast forward to today. A signal—'For the sake of what once was. We beg you. Help.'—reaches Mars.

How could they refuse? A consortium of Martian work crews gather the resources for a mission: a triumphal return to the blue-green world of their ancestors. And now here they are—three hundred million kilometres from home.

And it has all already gone horribly wrong.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This one will require you to go to the bookstore. It is worth it. If Dad's already read the first two books, it's a no-brainer...of course he wants this one. If he is a fan of Author Adrian's work, getting all three is a slightly pricier alternative, but about 97% probability of being a huge hit.

If he hasn't read the first two novels, though, this is set in their medium-term future, and requires no knowledge not given in the narrative here to understand what's going on. I've read both previous books and didn't feel it was a huge advantage; more a mild fillip of some extra fun to be had.

Four Martians respond to the Old Homestead's pretty vague plea for help. The story has chapters the way a ham has calories...lots and lots and all distributed in tasty hunks of richly marbled language. There are multiple PoVs, nine in all. Each one is moving the story...about the way the kindest intentions get deeply enmeshed in very challenging realities of human fallibility...and oftentimes in ways that aren't supposed to be funny, but are.

If your Dad is like me, deeply suspicious of any kind of AGI that pretends to infallibility or omniscience, then this is a great series to hook him on. Nothing about Bees, the Martian distributed consciousness (AGI rebranded), long ago banished from the severely collapsing Earth, is infallible, though it is good-hearted. The crisis of climate collapse is one Bees can definitely help remediate, you'd think, that being part of Bees' memories; but centuries on Mars have overlaid a lot of unhelpful knowledge. The Martian bioforms are such a great idea, and you *know* I approve of intelligent dog-forms! Their terrestrial rescuees are the usual lot of mired-in-muck religious nuts, feudal static thinkers who need help but only want it to look like their idea of a perfect present, and passive whiners. Al the Martians are oddly indulgent IMO. I'd've kicked ass, banged heads...but these rescuers really seem to try to stay helpful.

Ultimately, I'd give this to Dad because the very human-Dadly thing of needing to Fix It, to Help and to Serve a Purpose, all get a strong run. I enjoyed the story, I didn't feel it was tacked onto the end of a duology (a critique I saw that I found particularly unfair...it's been two hundred years since Bear Head so of course things changed!), and the overarching critique of flawed, fallible humanity was challenging but not bleak.

A lot like being a Dad.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SHROUD
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
Orbit Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$19.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An utterly gripping story of alien encounter and survival from Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Children of Time.

They looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back . . .

New planets are fair game to asset strippers and interplanetary opportunists—and a commercial mission to a distant star system discovers a moon that is pitch black, but alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is anathema to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.

Under no circumstances should a human end up on Shroud’s inhospitable surface. Except a catastrophic accident sees Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne doing just that. Forced to stage an emergency landing, in a small, barely adequate vehicle, they are unable to contact their ship and are running out of time. What follows is a gruelling journey across land, sea and air. During this time, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s dominant species. It also begins to understand them . . .

If they escape Shroud, they’ll face a crew only interested in profiteering from this extraordinary world. They’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A stand-alone story by a genre stalwart? Make the trip to the bookstore! A story where the aliens on a truly unnerving world are actually more humane than the humans' own bosses? Perfect for Dad on his special day, especially if he's not retired yet. Talk about living in hope....

Hope feels like a luxury to the women trying not to die on a moon whose every physical parameter seems purpose-built to kill them. (Of course it was—this is a novel.) These two women are put in a terrible place to determine if Shroud, the human name for their likely grave-place, has economic value to their corporation.

Author Adrian is not the biggest supporter of the capitalist world we live in. I knew I loved him for a reason.

As the constraints of Shroud bind their actions and options ever-tighther, their gynergy and their willingness to think outside the training and the constructs of their society coupled with Shroud's life form's desire to communicate with these utterly alien things meet and merge into true First Contact. One of my favorite plot devices, that.

I think it's clear I like Author Adrian's storytelling. I want to spoiler the hell out if why in this story's case more than in Bee Speaker's case. I'm really impressed this arachnid-fancyin' fantasy writer has bent his brain to the task of making Shroud make sense without showing too much of the gearshifting tech he used to get there. Author Adrian doesn't babble his techno, and doesn't imbibe a pint of handwavium before every chapter. I find the balance of fiction to science matches my preference in this story so perfectly you can't see the seam. Unless your Dad's a physicist by trade, I'm guessing he will quite probably enjoy this balance between story told and space-world built too.

I recommend it, and get one for yourself too. Borrowing Dad's might be tough to talk him into.

EVEN IN THE CANNON'S MOUTH, fourth novella in Monstrous Little Voices and a follow-on tale to Shakespeare's As You Like It

EVEN IN THE CANNON'S MOUTH
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY (Monstrous Little Voices #4)
Abaddon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Illyria’s Duke Orsino has raised new, powerful allies, and in a last-ditch attempt to win the war, Don Pedro and his brother John, wise old Jacques and the physician Helena sail to Milan to appeal in person for the wizard Prospero’s aid. But unseasonal storms drive them onto the Illyrian shore, and into the hands of their enemies...

Monstrous Little Voices is a collection of five short novellas, a single long tale set in Shakespeare’s fantasy world of fairies, wizards and potions, in honour of the four-hundredth anniversary of the Bard’s death.

My Review: Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis close to being my tippy-top very-best favorite in the collection! It is not because of any lack or failing that Tchaikovsky's entry comes in at 0.999999999999 of 1 in my affections, it is the happenstance of placement. This fourth of five novellas takes on As You Like It, a dear favorite play of mine; but the tale does so very near the close of the collection's business, and so is constrained to bring major thematic strands together while working within the conceit established for the whole endeavor.

A lesser writer would be sunk by meeting these rigorous demands. Tchaikovsky makes doing so look effortless and makes his audience chortle, snicker, giggle, and all while mopping away strange bits of moisture from the corner of the eye. No idea where those came from. But here's the rub for me: I sense that there was a lot, nay a plethora, of material that Tchaikovsky whipped in to the crème Chantilly that is Even in the Cannon's Mouth and was compelled to jettison it to serve his multiple masters.

I realize I could be completely wrong, Tchaikovsky isn't an intimate of mine and doesn't confide his secrets to me; but read this:

"You are most kind," Viola spoke over him. "And pray, will you not join us, who has such respect for learning?"
They passed some moments exchanging compliments, then sent the noble Spaniard off for more mugs, consigning him to the seven-deep scrum about the tapster. Viola let Feste ramble, watching the two foreigners try to follow his baffling loops of logic. At last she said, "Aye, we two are belike the foremost men of learning in all Illyria, and yet you see how fortune treats us! I myself have converse with angels and airy spirits most nights, and have studied with no lesser man than Doctor Dee, while Father Topaz has honed his craft in the invisible college of Verrucoporcus and conjured the stone philosophical. It has been many a cold week since last a stranger showed kindness to two poor scholars such as we."

This grace note off the mash-up within pastiche inside hommage shows the attentive reader just how much pruning must have gone into keeping this novella a novella and not a stonking tome. (Saint Quinculencus? HA!) A mind this well furnished and a spirit this inclined to playfulness must be severely disciplined to keep things concise.

The form Tchaikovsky uses to frame his tale is also an aid in this task. Acts and scenes and stage directions function as a corset does in assisting the costume to cover more fleshed-out bones than it could otherwise. They're in the spirit of the Bard, they're familiar to the audience likely to pick up the book, and they're practical. It isn't a small feat to understand all that and use it so seamlessly for all those purposes that the typical reader passes them all by unthinking.

These passages reveal the immense and demanding task behind the seemingly effortless storytelling going on in the foreground:

"We are between the pages of the world's book. Each scene and moment of our lives is pieced together in this space before it's served to us. We are where none of us was meant to be."

May I just say YES to this? And:

Parolles was still at his fictional Battle of Lepanto. Already he had travelled on a cannonball and hauled himself out of the water by his own hair. Each listener had tried to challenge the lie--Orsino, Don John, and Sir Toby among them--and each challenge he slew, and then piled up the bodies to reach even greater heights of the absurd. Where his words might have taken him, when the newcomers broke in, was past all guessing. Some men, when given rope, refuse to hang themselves but weave a ladder to the moon.

Aside from the humor and the dignity of the passage on its surface, there is in concert with the passage above a deep structural function to those ideas expressed. This becomes more obvious when the book has been consumed whole. But there is something, some gravitic effect like dark matter, that pulls the reader towards these moments and carves their importance on the awareness paid into any work of fiction.

Yet all without any sense of didactic purpose or clanking of barely invisible plot machinery. That, my friends, is the best quality of writing going today.