One of my favourite parts about the book are the sections between chapters that describe one alternative evolution of Earth each time. Not only does it help to explain evolutionary events in laymans terms, but it does so in such an engaging way. There are some Earths that have not evolved past the primordial goo, others where non-simian life is prevalent. We get to read more about some of these alternatives in the story too - my favourite by far being creatures who have evolved from rats along with a vast, space faring race which has to be read to be believed. olethros6 on The Secret of the Sul’Dam: Subtle Changes to the Way the One Power Works in The Wheel of Time TV Series 22 mins ago Dude wasn't even trying to make an engaging plot and God forbid he took time out to write characters that would even try to be engaging. In a nutshell, The Doors of Eden has a simple premise: the end of the universe. Not just ours, but every division that’s been occurring since the beginning of time. Make no mistake, this should skip your ‘to be read’ pile entirely. Instead, it belongs at the very top of your ‘must read’ shortlist! I don’t know how he’s done it, but Adrian has managed to write a gripping adventure, peopled with amazing characters—while also giving us the most awe-inspiring, inventive, breathtaking glimpse into the imagined inner workings of the universe and creation itself. I have never read anything like this. And if you read The Doors of Eden, it will enrich your life. Below Adrian has given us an insight into what inspired this book. This is followed by a look at that plot!

The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Ebook | Scribd The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Ebook | Scribd

They returned to the B&B to spend the evening inventing lurid tales of what might be found on Roberts’ land. They wondered whether he had faked the video himself or if someone had been gaslighting him – there seemed no shortage of suspects, from the way the old boy had gone on. Roberts had given his CCTV tapes to the police station, apparently. But they’d ended up leaked to a YouTube channel – so maybe the whole online exercise was to piss off Roberts should the man ever get near a modem. Full of sparking, speculative invention . . . The Doors of Eden is a terrific timeslip / lost world romp in the grand tradition of Turtledove, Hoyle, even Conan Doyle. If you liked Primeval, read this book Adrian Tchaikovsky is among my favorite science fiction writers, a prolific writer maintaining brainy inventive quality in all of his works, not afraid of venturing out into difficult concepts and making them fascinating. And his exceptional forte seems to be exploration of sentient life different from what we are used to, going past the humanoid bipedal relatable lifeforms and venturing into the worlds of spacefaring spiders and technologically advanced octopuses — and why not the worlds of spacefaring trilobites and frozen fish computers? Apparently, the man studied (not “read”, but studied “Lee was studying zoology at Reading, Mal was reading English Lit at Oxford—an establishment so exclusive that they had a whole other verb for what you did there”) Zoology for a reason. Mal, at that time: she was like porcelain. You’d think that she’d break into pieces with a little shove. For the longest time Lee had thoroughly envied her metabolism, because that girl could eat. Twice as much as Lee, whose mother would tut and nag about dress sizes and what nice boys might or might not want (a matter of supreme indifference to her), and yet Mal remained waif-like. She was so pale you could almost see through her; she dyed her short hair platinum because it annoyed her mother, and because she had a love-hate relationship with standing out. She hated strangers staring, hated the thought of people making judgements about her. Yet at the same time she couldn’t dress down and drab, like Lee usually did. A part of her had to be seen and heard, to know she was real. She looked at the horrible, crimsoned walls, seeing places where the blood hadn’t just spattered. She took one photo before she had to get out into the air: a few smears and lines, really. Nobody would have thought anything of them, save that there was purpose there. Something had made those streaks, way past the high-water mark of the killing. And they’d see marks like that again.This was a book I was really looking forward to as soon as I heard that Adrian Tchaikovsky had written a new SF novel (a.k.a doorstop) and after I had the privilege to hear him and Christopher Paolini discussing their new novels and the research and ideas that went into them. The book did not disappoint, and I ended up doing a combination of reading and also audiobooking it. When The Thing That Happened happened, Mal was still skinny, but you couldn’t see her bones quite as much. Lee’s worries about Mal meeting some Oxbridge wunderkind and running off with her had abated. More than that, Mal had been making plans. There are certain codings for how a creature moves that are designed to awaken a deep and ancestral unease. Lee had seen them all in those fake videos. Make something that’s too close to human for comfort; make something that jolts into sudden, scurrying motion like a spider. Design something that bends and flexes wrong, but not too wrong. There was a language of horripilation in creature design; ask any SFX studio that’s done a horror film or two. Tchaikovsky (Children of Time) launches his Final Architecture series with a dazzlingly suspenseful space opera. A colossal, sentient entity known as an Architect rips Earth apart into a Continue reading »

The Doors of Eden’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky Book Review: ‘The Doors of Eden’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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.I’m the one in the corner with my nose in a book. Chances are I’m soaring with dragons right now, but when I’m in reality, I’m a reader, writer, blogger and tea-drinker. The Earth tried to kill us in our cradle, but the timelines you have seen survived it, or at least bequeathed a relic of themselves to the future.

The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky | Waterstones The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky | Waterstones

There’re too many characters to talk about! But the great cast makes you feel both hopeful for humanity, and fear for it. A magnificent epic tale of devotion, possession, obsession, and strange destiny from the author of the Hugo Award-winning Tons of supporting characters make for memorable clashes and encounters with each of our PoV characters – the absolute stand-outs are Sabreur’s boss, Leslie Hind, who is a cold-blooded badass, and Dr. Rat, a mad genius of the most entertaining variety. 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. Up next we actually have an antagonist, sorta. The real antagonist of the story is the heat death of the universe, but Lucas is the right-hand man of another man who isn’t improving things. Lucas is a complicated character who falls into being a bad guy and doesn’t know how to stop. He doesn’t necessarily have a redemption arc, but his story does an amazing job exploring how the tiny choices we make build momentum into who we become, and in some ways how our circumstances–not our inherent nature– determines whether we are good or bad. His story is great; you will have to read the book to understand it better than I can reasonably explain here.

And you know what? It's VERY good for the imagination. For us, as readers, to think through the implications and dream and dream about what all those others that might/could/should become a vast side-series. They interviewed Lee three times, three different earnest, comforting police staff going through variants of the same questions, with her trotting out her true-enough answers – and she was bone-tired, shaking and upset. She could tell they were all Poor girl, losing her friend, and not one of them guessed she’d lost her lover, her heart, her whole life. She made herself stay awake, desperate to see Mal come through the hospital room door, unscathed, even if she blamed Lee for leaving, even if she hated her, even if she never wanted to see her again. Another one for the TBR – this sounds fantastic! I’ve been reading more sci-fi of late, but I haven’t read anything outside of YA yet, so I’m excited to try this author’s books. Great review!