Book Review | Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Source: Kindle Unlimited + Audible purchase. This is a review of my reading experience.

Elder Race is a scifi/fantasy novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way.

But a demon is terrorizing the land, and now she’s an adult (albeit barely) with responsibilities (she tells herself). Although she still gets in the way, she understands that the only way to save her people is to invoke the pact between her family and the Elder sorcerer who has inhabited the local tower for as long as her people have lived here (though none in living memory has approached it).

But Elder Nyr isn’t a sorcerer, and he is forbidden to help, and his knowledge of science tells him the threat cannot possibly be a demon...

I needed a quick scifi win after a DNF. It was the perfect time to pick up Elder Race. The sequel comes out soon so Elder Race has been hovering at the top of the TBR pile.

I was so confused when I started reading Elder Race! Why was there a princess in my scifi book traveling to a tower to ask the sorcerer to save her people with his magic? It became clear the farther I got into Elder Race. This book is so unique! I can always count on Adrian Tchaikovsky to do something unique, but I never know what it's going to be.

Elder Race is told in alternating POVs between the queen's daughter Lynesse and Elder Nyr. It's a beautiful marriage of fantasy and science fiction.

I'm so glad I picked this up, and I'm thrilled to get more later this year!

⭐⭐⭐⭐★
4/5 stars

Review | Ironclads by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Source: library borrow. This is a review of my reading experience.

Ironclads is the first novella in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Terrible Worlds: Revolutions series.

Scions have no limits. Scions do not die. And Scions do not disappear.

Sergeant Ted Regan has a problem. A son of one of the great corporate families, a Scion, has gone missing at the front. He should have been protected by his Ironclad – the lethal battle suits that make the Scions masters of war – but something has gone catastrophically wrong.

Now Regan and his men, ill equipped and demoralised, must go behind enemy lines, find the missing Scion, and uncover how his suit failed. Is there a new Ironclad-killer out there? And how are common soldiers lacking the protection afforded the rich supposed to survive the battlefield of tomorrow?

This is going to be a bit of a lackluster review, but I'm challenging myself to review all of the books that I finish this year. 

I consider myself a fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky, but he has written SO MANY books. I was in the mood to pick up something short from my library and Ironclads fit the bill.

As much as I love all of the science fiction I've read from Adrian Tchaikovsky, I'm not the target audience for this. While it's a dystopian scifi, it's also very much a military scifi. I struggled to enjoy this one. Every once in a while something would peak my interest, but I wasn't really pulled into the vibe of this one. If I had cared about the characters more, I think my interest level would have been a bit higher.

I wasn't mad at this book in anyway so this isn't a negative review, but my overall feelings are quite mid. If you love tactical military stuff, this may work out much better for you. 

⭐⭐⭐★★
3/5 stars

Review | And Put Away Childish Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Source: library borrow. This is a review of my reading experience.

And Put Away Childish Things is a fantasy novella from Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Harry Bodie’s been called into the delightful fantasy world of his grandmother’s beloved children’s books. It’s not delightful here at all.

All roads lead to Underhill, where it’s always winter, and never nice.

Harry Bodie has a famous grandmother, who wrote beloved children’s books set in the delightful world of Underhill. Harry himself is a failing kids’ TV presenter whose every attempt to advance his career ends in self-sabotage. His family history seems to be nothing but an impediment.

An impediment... or worse. What if Underhill is real? What if it has been waiting decades for a promised child to visit? What if it isn’t delightful at all? And what if its denizens have run out of patience and are taking matters into their own hands?

✅ Portal fantasy (and horror and scifi)
✅ Tchaikovsky spider

And Put Away Childish Things is the third novella in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Terrible Worlds: Destinations series, but each installment is a standalone story. I've read the first novella (Walking to Aldebaran) but haven't read the second one yet. My library happened to have this available when I needed a short read.

The main character Harry's grandmother was a famous children's author who wrote stories set in Underhill, and there are quite a few people who remain obsessed with his grandmother's stories. Set during the start of the pandemic, it felt like Tchaikovsky was working through a number of things with And Put Away Childish Things.

I continue to really enjoy Tchaikovsky's writing. He has written so many things that span the breadth of speculative fiction, and I intend to read them all.

⭐⭐⭐💫★
3.5/5 stars

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Review | Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Source: personal purchase. This is a review of my reading experience.

Shards of Earth is the first book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Final Architecture series.

The Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author of Children of Time brings us an extraordinary space opera about humanity on the brink of extinction, and how one man's discovery will save or destroy us all.

The war is over. Its heroes forgotten. Until one chance discovery . . .

Idris has neither aged nor slept since they remade him in the war. And one of humanity's heroes now scrapes by on a freelance salvage vessel, to avoid the attention of greater powers.

After earth was destroyed, mankind created a fighting elite to save their species, enhanced humans such as Idris. In the silence of space they could communicate, mind-to-mind, with the enemy. Then their alien aggressors, the Architects, simply disappeared—and Idris and his kind became obsolete.

Now, fifty years later, Idris and his crew have discovered something strange abandoned in space. It's clearly the work of the Architects—but are they returning? And if so, why? Hunted by gangsters, cults and governments, Idris and his crew race across the galaxy hunting for answers. For they now possess something of incalculable value, that many would kill to obtain.

Do you ever like a book and have nothing to say about it? My book club read Shards of Earth as our February book selection. We had book club today, and no one really had anything to say. The few of us that showed up and read it liked it (which was a little surprising to be honest), but we struggled to find things to talk about.

I annotate when I'm reading and I had a lot of tabs in this book, but I think pretty much every one of them dealt with unspace and the Architects. For me, unspace and the Architects were everything in this book. I feel like either my mind kind of glossed over everything else or it was just too much for me to grasp right now (highly possible). There were a lot of characters and politics and places.

So - I enjoyed parts of this book very much, but it's also not a favorite of mine outside of the fact that this book gave me the wonderful creeps and it's not even a horror book. I'm starting to realize how many frightening things are in scifi books. I need to start reading more each year than I normally do.

Having read Children of Time, I really thought Shards of Earth would stand on its own outside of the series its in, but that was not the case. The way it ended made it feel like this book was really just the beginning. At 500+ pages, that's a chunky beginning. But I'll be reading more! I need to know more about the Architects and what is going to happen.

I recommend Shards of Earth but not as a first Tchaikovsky book. Read some of his other stuff first so you will trust him enough to read through this one.

3/5 stars
⭐⭐⭐★★

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Book Review | Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time is the first book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series.

Adrian Tchaikovksy's award-winning novel Children of Time, is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.

Who will inherit this new Earth?

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age -- a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.

Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

So I hate spiders. But what I do love is reading about alien life forms. That is a favorite thing. There are uplifted (intelligent) spiders in Children of Time, and they are honestly the best story line of the book.

Children of Time also follows a dual timeline of a ship crewed by the last humans.

I originally gave this book 3 stars when I read it back in 2019, but I can't remember why my rating wasn't higher. It has remained with me and I've been wanting to reread it ever since. As per usual when I reread something, I'm upping my rating. Children of Ruin (the sequel to Children of Time) came out a few years ago, but I haven't read it yet. It's been hard for me to read the chunky, epic books that I used to read, but I've made a few changes to my reading life this year that will free up more time for the chunky SFF books I've been missing.

I recently found out the third book (Childen of Memory) will be coming out later this year so this turned out to be perfect timing to jump back into this universe.

The only other book I've read by Adrian Tchaikovsky is Walking to Aldebaran which I really enjoyed as well. I'd love to read a lot more of his catalog. I've heard amazing thing about his fantasy novel Guns of the Dawn.

If you haven't read anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky, it sounds like you can really start anywhere with his books, but I do recommend this one if you love science fiction and discovering new species (even if that new species happens to be spiders!).

4/5 stars
⭐⭐⭐⭐★

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