The Doors of Eden begins with two friends, Lee and Mal, amateur Cryptozoologists as they investigate sightings of a monster on Bodmin Moor. No, not ‘The’ beast, though the setting was likely not an accident. Whilst looking for the sighted creature, Mal disappears, leaving Lee with a strange and unbelievable story involving snow in the middle of July.

Four years later Mal has returned, bringing with her unbelievable stories of other worlds. Their story soon becomes tangled with that of a Government Physicist, Kay Amal Khan, whose work into the extradimensional reveals parallel Earths, and a hastily unravelling reality.

I’ve read a number of Adrian Tchaikovsky books, including the Children of Time series, and once again he demonstrates a deep knowledge of Zoology. It’s no surprise when you learn that he studied it at University.

The Doors of Eden was however a departure of what I was used to from Tchaikovsky. Familiar mostly with the sci-fi fantasy of the Children of Time series, the closest I’ve gotten to a tale set on Earth is Cage of Souls which, to anyone familiar, is eminently unfamiliar.

The novel was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I really enjoyed the dimension hopping and the depictions of the various creatures that had evolved and become the apex predator on each world. You can tell Tchaikovsky enjoyed creating these monsters. I got a little bogged down with the scientific paper interjections that would pop up every so often.

This very minor dislike aside, I really enjoyed The Doors of Eden, it’s another well written and engaging story by one of the modern greats of science fiction.

After absolutely loving Children of Time, I was very excited to have been approved to read and review Tchaikovksy's latest book!

This was a fantastic book and I ended up really enjoying it.
Mal and her girlfriend Lee spend most of their free time hunting down creatures that are often believed to be legends or conspiracy theories (think something along the lines of the Loch Ness monster, or a yeti). Whilst hunting a reported sighting of a 'birdman', something strange happens, and Mal goes missing without a trace.
We then follow Lee a few years later on when she starts to receive calls seemingly from Mal, but they don't show up in her call log afterward.
It's a tale that also involves top-secret government security, parallel universes, and a whole lot of super-clever evolutionary biology.
This isn't going to be a book for everyone but I thought that it was a very cleverly written sci-fi thriller possessing a fantastically diverse cast, which is something the sci-fi genre is so desperately lacking. We don't just follow Lee though. In fact, we get to experience multiple POVs that were very well balanced and complementing of each other.
The only issue that I had was that it did get a little confusing in places as so much was going on and there were so many characters being introduced.

Overall, I really enjoyed this. I'm a huge fan of stories with parallel universes so, paired with the super cool science, this book was a perfect match for me!

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Tchaikovsky always surprise us with his imagination. I enjoyed the novel, but what i enjoyed most is the interludiums about the evolution of life in other earths.
A review in spanish: https://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-doors-of-eden-adrian-tchaikovsky.html

Sadly I ran out of patience with this story. It is interesting but not captivating. Its failure to hold my attention meant that I was putting it down more often than I was picking it up. There are a number of storylines that show signs of convergence as well as groups of characters with different objectives. It is not a difficult story to follow and perspective change does provide some variety. The writing style is approachable and handles complexity well.

The pace is moderately fast and there are sufficient action sequences to provide interest. Characterisation is handled well and personality traits make it easy to identify the key players and their intent. The world-building is quite complex and the use of a story thread that provides an explanation of the science is an interesting and effective tool.

Relationships between the characters are kept quite tense and a resolution seems to be kept one step away. The baddies are suitably cold and heartless, which keep the tension high.

This was my first book by this author, and while it won’t be my last, I don’t know if I’d be rushing out to read another one immediately. Not any fault of the author, because the writing and premise are great but more a case of finding it hard to really immerse myself into the story. I just couldn’t get on with it unfortunately.

Resulta interesante comprobar como Adrian Tchaikovsky se ha ido moviendo desde una decalogía de fantasía con la que se dio a conocer hace más de diez años, Shadows of the Apt, hacia libros de ciencia ficción donde está explorando buena parte de los temas más clásicos de la ciencia ficción. De hecho, hasta donde recuerdo y puedo estar equivocado, su producción publicada en estos dos últimos años la podemos casi circunscribir a este género salvo por pequeñas aportaciones fantásticas como la original Made Things o, algo antes, Redemption’s Blade. Hablando de un autor que publica tres o cuatro novelas al año, su porcentaje de ciencia ficción comparada con la fantasía es notoriamente más alto en la actualidad.

Tras el merecido éxito de Children of Ruin el pasado año (la tan ansiada continuación de Herederos del Tiempo, la cual fue publicada por Alamut en castellano pero de la que aún no se sabe si traducirán esta segunda parte de la saga) llega The Doors of Eden, donde Tchakovsky vuelve a echar toda la carne en el asador con numerosas tramas, especies y mundos alternativos.

La novela comienza con dos jóvenes, Lee y Mal, que están al acecho de ciertos seres mitológicos lo que las lleva en este caso a Bodmin, una zona en ruinas situada en Cornualles, al suroeste de Inglaterra. Sin embargo, durante su escapada, una de ellas desaparece. Cuatro años después, la desaparecida ya no lo es tal, apareciendo nuevamente en la vida de su antigua amante. Esto, que a priori parece una novela juvenil sin mayor pretensión, termina por convertirse, durante buena parte de la primera mitad del libro, en un techno thriller junto a diversos agentes del MI5 británico, científicos y otros personajes de diversa procedencia. Nada que envidiar a series de televisión ya clásicas como Fringe.

En paralelo a todo esto, la frenética narración se ve cada poco tiempo interrumpida por extractos de un libro escrito por Ruth Emerson, una profesora de la universidad de California, titulado Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence. Este libro nos cuenta, desde los inicios del planeta Tierra, como pequeños cambios surgidos durante esta evolución biológica de las especies fueron dando lugar a diferentes planetas y realidades alternativas. Estos capítulos, no demasiado largos pero sí densos, son una maravilla de imaginación por parte de Tchaikovsky.

¿Recordáis la joven que había desaparecido buscando seres mitológicos y que cuatro años después volvía a aparecer? No hago apenas spoilers si digo que los universos alternativos que se han ido creando a lo largo de la historia del Universo están empezando a resquebrajarse y seres de todos ellos están empezando a moverse entre realidades creando una situación cuanto menos comprometida. La novela sigue las aventuras de los personajes por estos mundos donde la Tierra es muy diferente de la que conocemos. Las criaturas y seres han evolucionado de una manera, en ocasiones, muy distinta: ratas avanzadas y difícilmente distinguibles de humanos en cuanto a inteligencia, dinosaurios gigantes que siguen poblando de manera mayoritaria el planeta o, como no, los tan adorados insectos que Tchaikovsky conoce tan bien y que ya hemos visto en anteriores obras.

El añadido de estos mundos le añade un gran valor a una novela que de por sí sería un buen techno thriller como se ve en la primera mitad de la novela, convirtiéndola en un viaje infinito de incalculables consecuencias. Todo esto incluyendo, además, ciertos elementos de actualidad como el Brexit, cambio climático o los nacionalismos.

No es una novela ligera de leer, sobre todo en su segunda mitad donde la trama se alarga ligeramente. Tiene múltiples puntos de vista, las realidades se confunden por momentos y el viaje requiere cierta atención. No es un volumen para una lectura rápida o en diagonal sino para dedicarle su tiempo y dejarse llevar por el imaginario de Adrian Tchaikovsky, quien parece estar empeñado en revisar a su manera los grandes temas de la ciencia ficción clásica. Seguramente sea una de las novelas de ciencia ficción más completas en cuanto a dichos elementos que he leído ultimamemente, más ambiciosa que Herederos del Tiempo y, quizá, que su continuación Children of Ruin. Por mi parte, encantado de seguir revisando estas ideas de la mano de sus libros.

Adrian Tchaikovsky continues to impress. Is there a genre he hasn’t tried yet? In Doors of Eden he looks at parallel worlds coming together and the things that are coming through the cracks. Ever considered taking a deep dive into a multiverse of parallel Earths? If yes, don’t wait any longer and experience insane interdimensional adventure.
Lee and Mal, two British girls fascinated by cryptozoology, are an item. During their hunt for a mysterious Bird man somewhere in Wales, they make a breakthrough discovery. Before they can share or document it, one of girls gets lost. For years. As if she disappeared from the surface of the Earth. 

Four years later, the missed girl contacts the other one through a phone call that leaves no record. From there things go downhill quickly. The Doors of Eden combine a techno-thriller narrative with evolutionary biology and hard sci-fi. And it rocks. The book awes with mind-bending concepts such as moving between the worlds. Sometimes through walls and sometimes through “doors” that appear in most unexpected places, just for a second. The worlds we explore feel distinct and their inhabitants took biology im most unexpected directions. Among bizarre creatures introduced in the book, you’ll find, for example, fishes that upload their minds into ice-bound supercomputers or super intelligent squids. We get a secret agent, trans mathematician, and intelligence analyst added to the mix. It tackles serious themes like Brexit, English nationalism, climate change but keeps them relevant to the story.

Tchaikovsky does an amazing job of fleshing out all the characters, bad guys included. The book introduces a lot of POV characters. Some get a lot of screen time, others a little. Things feel balanced, though. The multiverse itself is a marvel to behold. World-building rarely impresses me, but in The Doors of Eden it left me speechless and awed. I found it bold, imaginative, with a sense of scale epic in scope, but not so large as to detract from the complex relationships between characters. To make things even more thrilling,Tchaikovsky throws in plenty of surprises. He makes his characters struggle as they fight to save one another, but also to change the world in unexpected ways.

The Doors of Eden explores big ideas and rewards patient readers. Despite strong focus on evolutionary science and detailed world-building, it keeps a compelling character journey that heightens the emotional core of the novel. Not an easy read by any means, but it’s well worth the time.

The Doors of Eden is a new standalone novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose other books I’ve been known to talk about very highly. If I’m honest, I went into this excited, and with pretty high expectations. And you know what, it’s a great book. A sci-fi thriller, which mixes the author’s trademark grand scope and big ideas, with some gritty, kick-arse action, and some characters whose depth and heart gives the novel a strong, genuine sense of humanity.

This is a story that looks at the strange, at the unexplained. That wonders what happens when the mists rise up in a particular place at a particular time, taking people with them when they go. That has a sense of the wonder and mystery of the unexplained, the horror and excitement of breaching the boundaries of the unknowable. Because as the story begins, we’re looking at a pair of young idiots (Lee and Mal, two young women whose romance is heartstoppingly heartfelt, and fantastically real) stepping off the metaphorical edge of the world. The consequences are there, sure enough. And the characters themselves - more on them in a minute. But they’re living that deep breath of tension as they step over a line, from one moment, one life, into another. And that’s the soul of the book, for me. Discovery, connection, understanding – the best qualities of people are here, as they delve into things people were perhaps not meant to know. Because humanity is great at doing stupid things and seeing what happens later, and Lee and Mal are, in this case, even better than most of us.

That said, they’re definitely challenged by Julian Sabreur, MI5 desk jockey, and general management-level intelligence troublemaker. Julian and one of his colleagues have a penchant for getting dragged into the weirder aspects of some of their cases. Things that are shimmering at the edge of the map, while Lee and Mal stumble through that terra incognita. If the younger couple have their romance, Julian’s detachment, emotional repression, and self-awareness about himself, twinned with a sharp intelligence, is equally refreshing, a delight in precision character-crafting. A dry wit completes the deal, as does the gently bubbling care he shows for those whom he works with, and his genuine love and loyalty for the country he serves.

And then there’s Dr. Khan. She’s smart, driven, compassionate, and has a tendency to attract trouble Or at least, is prone to people knocking her door down in an effort to find out what she knows about mysterious disappearances, and asking awkward questions MI5 would also rather like the answers to. A fierce individual, and it’s great to see a scientist given room to show their vigour and passion. Personally, I found her struggle to deal with bigots, alongside the broader sweep of universe-shattering events in the story to be emotionally affecting, adding further emotional weight and gravitas to a story which already had a surfeit of wonderful characterisation.

Anyway, this motley bunch are all driving different agendas, all looking at strange disappearances, and indeed appearances. Trying to understand what’s happening, and why. In this they’re ably assisted by fantastic superscience, by their own wits and guile, and (though in this case perhaps assisted is the wrong word) by a sinister billionaire and associated henchmen, who, of course, have a mission of their own.
And it works. The story begins cloaked in mystery, sure. But it has a thread of tension, an edge running through it like a razor seeping through cloth. Each turn of the page opens up the characters, and us, to a little more of the truth, doses out revelation with swift assurance but slow doses, and ratchets up the stakes, the connection, the pace, just a little at the same time. This is one that will grab hold of you and refuse to let go, while you work with our protagonists to try and understand what’s going on, and what they should do about it, while they discover things about each other, and themselves, at the same time as they’re trying to put the world (or the universe?) to rights.

Speaking of the world. There’s some beautifully imaginative world building here. Mists that sink into your bones. A London that’s strangely familiar, or perhaps, not actually that familiar at all. And there are stranger places by far on the table – though for sake of spoilers, I shan’t go into detail. But know this. As ever for Tchaikovsky, those worlds are crafted to a soaring scale, but detailed with a care and attention that makes them feel lived in, feel real – the strange and the familiar mixed together to make something new, something it’s impossible to look away from.

So yes. This is a good story. A great one, even. It has a world that will capture your attention, and characters whose struggles will capture your heart, even as the story shoots it full of adrenaline. This is another fantastic tale from Tchaikovsky, and one I can recommend to you without reservation. Go and pick up a copy, as fast as you can. Just watch out for mists on your way to the shops....

For an author with such a prolific output, Adrian Tchaikovsky still manages to find new themes and ideas to explore. This latest SF novel is entirely separate from his Children of Time series. Instead of in space it is set on Earth, or to be precise, as the reader soon discovers, on multiple Earths.
The story starts when a young woman, Mal disappears inside a stone circle on Bodmin Moor, when she and her girlfriend, Lee were pursuing their cryptozoology hobby (searching for mysterious and mostly non-existent monsters). Four years later, she reappears in London. As Lee and Mal re-connect it soon becomes apparent that Mal has been somewhere very strange and is now connected to a mysterious and violent altercation which prevented the kidnapping of an eminent physicist, Dr Kay Amal Khan. From this starting point, more characters are introduced including MI5 officials, a racist millionaire and various “aliens” from alternative timelines.
The gateway or crack through which Mal disappeared is a doorway to another Earth, one on which life developed differently to our own. As the story develops it becomes clear that the number of these cracks are proliferating. As the number of cross-over events increases, it becomes harder to hide them from the public and the reader begins to see the many different forms that intelligent life has formed.
Two competing groups are trying to use Dr Khan and her research to rapidly try and establish the cause and devise a solution before the whole elaborate structure of multiple Earths collapses. Collaboration and pooling of expertise from all the different species will be necessary but there are power struggles over the direction of the solution, with rivalries and sabotage threatening to wipe out everyone.
As before, the author demonstrates a magnificent and impressive imagination, particularly with the various alternative Terrans. To reveal them all would be to spoil things but they are unexpected, vary widely from “human” forms and are consistent with branchpoints in evolutionary history when things might easily have taken a different turn.
The author also takes some chances with the structure of this novel which a lesser writer might not have been able to do successfully. The earlier chapters are interspersed with extracts from “Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence” which is purportedly an academic book. This could have been a little dry to read at first but it builds into a poignant comment on the potential fragility of all lifeforms, especially some who are the architects of their own destruction and also cleverly links back and elucidates the main narrative. Towards the end of the novel, the author also plays again with the structure of the narrative, which is at first a little confusing but is revealed later as absolutely essential to the plot.
This is a story with a lot of big ideas and things to think about. As expected with this author, as well as a superb SF story there are also lots of metaphors which the reader can choose to ignore but which to my mind enhance the book. If I have a caveat and it is minor, it is that in such a wide-ranging, packed story with multiple viewpoints, I sometimes felt that the characters could have done with a little more time to develop. That being said, I loved this book and one final thing I should mention is the continued delight I get from this author’s prose. He has a talent for simile and humour which reminds me of Terry Pratchett, as well as some of that author’s righteous anger and sympathy for “ordinary people”. This is another of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s works which I foresee being nominated for awards.

Received from Pan Macmillan and Netgalley for honest read and review.
I have read a couple of books from Adrian Tchaikovsky,and I have to say that this is up there as one of his best.Really enjoyed this one from start to finish.

Centres around 2 main characters Mal and Lee and how their lives split into parallel worlds.
A brilliant concept that was really well written that had me hooked right from the start.

I am not normally a great loverr of sci-fi fantasy ,but this one was really worth it.

Not the sci-fi I was expecting, but definitely the sci-fi I didn’t even know I needed. Full of cryptid hunters, parallel dimensions and rifts in space and time. I love the author’s work but I think this is one of my favourites. Fast paced, intense and with an amazingly well built world and engaging characters. Highly recommend.

I am constantly amazed by the authors imagination and ability to build world's and fill them with characters of such depth and personality that in his previous books I have actually empathised with spiders and octopi!! Whilst this book leaves the esoteric species aside it is a book rich in ideas and invention, I would be afraid to have his dreams



E

Aunque hace algún tiempo que un libro nuevo de Adrian Tchaikovsky ha dejado de ser noticia por lo habitual de sus publicaciones, poder leer un libro del prolífico autor siempre es bienvenido. Además, si es una novela de ciencia ficción sobre mundos paralelos qué queréis que os diga, la emoción va subiendo.

Tchaikovsky vuelve a hacer gala de su deslumbrante imaginación y de sus conocimientos de biología en una novela estructurada en dos partes que parecen estar diferenciadas, pero que acabarán uniéndose. Por un lado, tendremos acceso a los extractos de una obra denominada Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence de la profesora Ruth Emerson de la Universidad de California. Y por otro lado tenemos el centro de la novela, también con hilos independientes en un principio que poco a poco se van uniendo conforme los protagonistas se van conociendo y estableciendo relaciones entre ellos.
Personalmente, me he sentido fascinada por los extractos de la supuesta obra de divulgación, por las muchísimas posibilidades que el autor nos expone cambiando tan solo un poco las condiciones de la Tierra hace millones de años y viendo cómo la ciega evolución crea y destruye vida al azar. Esta parte del libro me parece sencillamente espectacular, un ensayo sobre posibles caminos que hubiera podido tomar la vida en nuestro planeta.
La otra parte es más convencional y aunque me haya resultado menos atractiva no por ello deja de ser interesante. Tchaikovsky nos narra una trama de espionaje y conspiraciones de consecuencias inesperadas. Aunque he de reconocer que algunas de las «sorpresas» que nos aguardan a lo largo de las páginas son algo previsibles según qué bagaje lector tengamos, los capítulos están escritos con buen ritmo y apenas hay momentos de descanso. Merece la pena resaltar el tratamiento de la orientación sexual de algunos de los personajes y cómo se hace uso de ella para subyugarles y obligarles a realizar acciones contra su voluntad. El hecho de que con la increíble variedad de posibles protagonistas que tenía a su disposición el escritor haya decidido tomar un camino eminentemente antropocentrista resulta algo decepcionante.
El autor experimenta hacia el final del libro con el lector ofreciéndole información que puede parecer contradictoria, aunque luego todo quede explicado. Esta parte final quizá pueda resultar algo tramposa y es otro de los pocos defectos que le veo al libro.
Con The Doors of Eden Adrian Tchaikovsky se postula como un claro contendiente para las nominaciones de premios del año que viene. Espero no equivocarme en mi vaticinio.

Two British girls Lee and Mal write articles for Fortean Times which specializes on speculations about anomalous phenomena, Cryptozoology (think of Yetis), or conspiracy theories. Out in the Wales landscape, they encounter a mysterious bird man, and it seems that their journalistic dream came true. Only that one of them got lost for several years. Four years later, the story sets off by slowly opening the doors to alternative Earths in parallel universes. Don't expect Werewolfes jump scaring you like in an Urban Fantasy.  Instead, Tchaikovsky explores diverging paths in Earth's history where other entities could have developed intelligence - there are the Neanderthals of course, but also rat populations, as well as far more bizarre developments like huge immortal cambrian trilobites conquering the solar system and beyond, or super intelligent squids.

This mixes well with a secret agent story arc around MI5 agent Julian and intelligence analyst Alison working from their London offices. They try to save and rescue a kidnapped mathematician Khan who should solve the multiverse puzzle - because the universe is collapsing.

Last time I read something from Tchaikovsky was Children of Time in 2015, and it went very well. First of all, I like Tchaikovsky's style in this novel: His tongue in the cheek telling of cryptoid hunting girls uncovering an alternate reality. Interleaving the story, pseudo scientific articles extrapolate how biology could have evolved. Also, I loved the setting - the landscape of Great Britain with London as a focal point as a welcomed divergence from so many SF novels, with its insights to British culture like the weird magazine Fortean Times. I found the pacing very good with a slow exposition turning to high speed James Bondish stunt action resolving in a thoughtful unexpected ending. All characters are relatable and charming in their diversity. I just miss a single main protagonist that I could focus on.
It is certainly a different story than his Space Opera Children of Time or his fantasy novels - as it is set in our time and our world (mostly). But then again it is not so much different, as there are spiders and WhatIf scenarios about alternate biological developments.

Two girlfriends, their parents* not even considering that they're more than gals being pals, also share another interest – in Fortean phenomena, cryptids and the like. On one of their holidays following up on grainy online videos, they realise far too late that the hunt and the hints were fun, but genuinely coming face to face with something not of this world is terrifying and extremely dangerous. Only one of them returns. And then, years later, the other gets in touch, with a 'phone call that leaves no record. Their story intertwines with that of a spy (well, he works for MI5, but the distance between his job and Bond's is a source of ongoing mild vexation to him); his anxious, maybe aspie analyst colleague; the academic they know who's doing something weird with maths and physics that almost nobody else really understands but is somehow terribly important; and a megalomaniacal tycoon who, not that long ago, might have seemed an implausible Bond villain caricature, but nowadays feels positively subdued, plus his head goon. The story, at least initially, is a very specific sort of portal-fantasy-meets-conspiracy-thriller-except-actually-parallel-worlds-SF on which, as a rule, I'm burned out; I enjoyed Alternities, I enjoyed Cowboy Angels, but even with a writer I really rate such as Charlie Stross, where I've read everything else that's properly available, the ones walking this beat are the only series on which I stalled.

But then I also hate spiders, far more than any sub-subgenre, and Tchaikovsky got me to read two hefty books about them (and this book, while not part of that series or world, does also have a brief appearance by some of the bastard things). He's said that this was another outlet for the same interest in deep evolutionary worldbuilding which powered the Children books, and goodness me it shows; at times, I was pretty much putting up with the story about the humans to get to the next one of the interludes in which a less personal narrator sketches out the evolution of other Earths, the rise, fall and sometimes rise again of the utterly alien sentiences which sprang from slightly different rolls of the same dice. I love this sort of storytelling at such a colossal scale it barely even counts as fiction, except in so far as it's clearly not a record of our world's facts – Olaf Stapledon being the obvious example, but also the likes of Dougal Dixon. You find it in other fiction too, of course, but normally drip-fed, and as a reader who finds 'show, don't tell' among the worst of writing advice (so long, of course, as the teller has the skill of telling well) that frustrates me; a lot of SF is giving me little lines of it to sniff, when I want to go full Scarface on a big bowl of the stuff. It made me realise, part of my problem with those other parallel world thrillers is that they generally have the divergence point too late – often well into human time, sometimes strictly within the past couple of centuries, so all the different worlds are fairly similar beyond some variations in human political bullshit. Whereas this has branches coming off far earlier, meaning its other worlds can be far stranger; think The Long Earth, but with more sentience and not nearly so quiet. And in terms of the plot, as against the set-up, there's a surprising amount of shared tissue with His Dark Materials.

Still, this doesn't entirely get us out of the genre's workhorses: the people the spy type thinks are foreign agents, but who turn out to come from a lot further away than that; those untraceable calls; the computer suddenly overtaken by windows full of mysterious data (and I don't recall it being specified, but in my head these are absolutely green text on a black background). There are lots of cheap scenes in offices or remote locations, interspersed with a few setpiece shootouts in familiar landmarks. At one point one of the protagonists describes the situation as "Perfect action movie material", and she's not wrong: more so than anything else I've read by Tchaikovsky, I can picture a film version of this, albeit one which would probably lose all the bits I most liked. It has morals which, while certainly not wrong, are also fairly simple and clear-cut: diversity and co-operation are a source of strength, monocultures of weakness; sociopathic corporate greed is not a good thing; even decent people occasionally get a pronoun wrong when flustered, but wilful transphobia is a dick move. Some of the bolder decisions which might once have presented a problem for mainstream audiences are now familiar [and from here to the end of this parapgraph, SPOILERS]; the use of an internal reset button, or something which at first looks like one, has been normalised by everything from The Good Place to Deadpool 2. On the other hand, the villain who's brought along for no very good reason just so that he can be on hand to do something villainous at the last moment? I suspect that one was old before the giant trilobites' world branched from our own, and is one extinction I would absolutely welcome. As for the section in which the applicability of the novel's broader sentiments to the current clusterfuck of Brexit is made painfully and directly apparent...well, it's not that I disagree, but it still feels like a deeply clunky 'I learned something today' in a story that would have been healthier without it. As too the will they/won't they romance, though at least both are to some extent defused by those branching timelines, and the romance subplot entirely redeemed with one line right at the end.

But I was still having problems with the set-up even before that. The first few times people move between worlds, stepping out of walls and disappearing into directions that aren't usually there, it's creepy and cool. But as the story becomes more enmeshed with characters who know how this works, then much like the collapsing multiverse it risks formlessness – when both sides can pop up pretty much anywhere, even in the enemy's stronghold, there's not a great deal to stop proceedings turning into an endless carousel of capture-escape-recapture to rival even the most overstretched 10-parter from the old days of Doctor Who (and yes, The War Games, I am looking at you), which makes the book's middle a bit of a slog. As for the leads...by most standards, they're a commendably diverse bunch. But compare them to the POV characters in the Children books, or the truly other minds of the supporting cast here, and they're all part of the most over-represented demographic in all media: contemporary Earth humans. Which couldn't help but nag me, set me thinking about the epic possibilities had the multiversal structure here instead been bolted on to the world of the Children books. Now, I realise on one level that complaining an author has written the book they've written, instead of the book you'd rather they'd written, does to some extent make me the arsehole here. But in my defence, a share of that blame should also rest with the publisher. Consider that cover – the style, the font, the Clarke award badge. Even to some extent the title, which while certainly not random, is hardly the most obvious match for the contents. They're all very reminiscent of Children Of Time and Children Of Ruin, aren't they? Normally, if you look at Tchaikovsky's books, it's clear from the covers that Made Things is not Walking To Aldebaran is not the fantasy series, and a reader who enjoyed one will not necessarily go for the others. I like that; it makes it easier to make one's own decisions, easier to convince other potential readers by giving them the right point of entry. I remember how discombobulated I was when China Mieville's publisher stopped doing likewise and instead gave all his fiction a one-size-fits-all livery which didn't suit any of them half so well as their disparate original styles. So I suspect part of my disconnect may be that a story which would have been way, way more exciting and open than I expected had it looked like a techno-thriller, instead feels a little cramped and quotidian simply because the lexical code is trying to tell me it's kin to colossal far-future SF.

Which said, it's not *not* kin to them either. It does have some absolutely huge concepts and vistas, even if they're not at the forefront in quite the same way. Tchaikovsky still has a lovely turn of phrase, for the little social-realist observational details as well as for the bonkers interdimensional stuff. The leads may all be Homo sapiens, but they're far less dull than most such. It's not remotely a bad book, by any means – it just isn't quite the book I hoped it would be.

*And at least in some territories, the book's blurb too.