Adrian Czajkowski (spelt as Adrian Tchaikovsky for his books; born June 1972) is a British fantasy and science fiction author. He is best known for his series Shadows of the Apt, and for his Hugo Award-winning Children of Time series. [1] Lee thought she’d lost Mal, but now she’s miraculously returned. But what happened that day on the moors? And where has she been all this time? Mal’s reappearance hasn’t gone unnoticed by MI5 officers either, and Lee isn’t the only one with questions. On the whole I never felt that anyone was in any real peril, so there wasn’t any urgency to see how the assembly of people fixed the problem, because fixing it I was sure they would, though again, the how is left vague and unexplained.

On the plus side, Tchaikovsky is still fascinating when he engages in his favorite game : anthropomorphic presentation of our evolutionary partners. Whether you believe in spacefaring trilobites the size of aircraft carriers or not has little relevance to the actual story. Early science-fiction had a similar cavalier attitude to rigorous scientific arguments, being more concerned with the BIG ideas and with the fate of humanity as a whole [they were also often sketchy about character development]. By those early standards, mr. Tchaikovsky has written a classic of the genre, a daring feat of imagination and an engaging call to arms to save our own Eden while we still can.Then we move to the lesbian teenagers in love, Lee and Mal. They are fine. Their story isn’t particularly interesting, and they don’t feel like they mesh well with the urgent narrative – but their budding relationship is still enjoyable and they have relatable personalities. They felt like they were around to catalyze a few “aha” moments for other characters and I wish they had a little more agency in the actual story. The fabric between multiple earths is weakening allowing multiple portals to open between various timelines. Four years before the events in the story take place two young women, Lee and Mal, cryptid, or monster, hunters, went out searching for a mysterious ‘bird-man’ who had been caught on a farmer’s CCT cameras. Unfortunately not only did they find them, Mal disappeared. Whilst studying at the University of Reading he managed a role-playing game named Bugworld. The game concerned the story of the insect-people of the Lowlands, threatened by the encroaching Wasp Empire. From this original scenario the entire series of books grew. When reading Tchaikovsky's science fiction work I always get the feeling that I am reading something that is extremely special. The Doors of Eden come across as intelligent, well-researched, and incredibly detailed. Some of the science-specific language and the interludes written by the fictional Professor Ruth Emerson were a bit "over my head" at times yet this is possibly intentional because as a reader I learned to understand the complexities just as the characters themselves did. I'm afraid that I did skim-read a couple of the interludes to return to the main bulk of the story until I understood their importance and how they actually fit with the overall narrative. If I reread this novel I will not make this mistake again. In Children of Time Tchaikovsky dazzled us with a complex tale of spider evolution (albeit with some inadvertent help from humanity), weaving a rich tale involving spider society's transformation along a similar linear path as humanity- dark ages, enlightenment, industrial revolution and so forth. He does something similar here (albeit much less fleshed out) of each of the dominant species that populated various Earths. I guess the Zoology reading he did at Reading really paid off in the end! He really does make evolution interesting!

Interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Shadow of the Apt series". www.londoncalling.com . Retrieved 23 January 2019.

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The lesson here is that the Earth doesn’t care; that bad things happen; that it could so easily have been us.” They were all living in what was simply a possibility. All of reality, which had seemed so robust and enduring, was merely the fevered dream of a dying god. In much the same way, a single-celled creature might see its drop of water as a vast and eternal ocean even as the sun came out of the clouds to dry it up.

There’re too many characters to talk about! But the great cast makes you feel both hopeful for humanity, and fear for it.And Nazi Jeff Bezos is another example. In Children of Time all of the “evil characters” had understandable motivations. They had a goal, and were willing to do what it took. But NJB’s felt entirely dependent on what the author need from a bad guy. In the beginning he’s portrayed as ruthless in trying to achieve his ambitious and selfish aims. He has no loyalty or ideology outside of power, and is willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to do so. Later he talks about pursuing immortality with help from the rats, and it implies he wants this unchanging dystopian hellscape where he is eternally in charge. That makes sense. But then at the end of the book his ambition changes to saving England and transplanting it to some untouched Eden so he can plunder there? And he’s willing to sacrifice the vast majority of human technology, progress & luxuries to rule over the rubble and rule as a petty fascist? AND he’s willing to abandon his goal of immortality (since he abandoned all non humans and most of their research) to be a petty Oswald Moseley for a couple decades? This makes no sense. He was always willing to use those people, and certainly seemed to have some sympathy for them but he was using them like he used everyone else. The motivations are just so inconsistent, and seemed to change depending on what a super bad evil bad man would do at the moment. By the end he has as much depth as a Captain Planet villain. The plot which starts as a mystery, grows in the telling with additional characters and plots being brought in. We have a government Physicist, Kay, an MI5 agent, Julien and his friend and co-worker Alison. They all get brought into the story when some sort of veiled threats or maybe alien threats are being brought against Kay, and then weird, weird things start to link them to the disappearance of Mal and the footage they have of that. Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of my must-buy authors. He effortlessly moves between science fiction and fantasy, and he makes it look easy. His vast imagination is mindblowing, and his ideas always turn into fascinating thought experiments.