Earth
failed. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, Heorest Holt,
carried its precious human cargo to a potential new paradise. Generations later, this fragile
colony has managed to survive, eking out a hardy existence. Yet life is tough, and much
technological knowledge has been lost.
Then strangers appear. They possess unparalleled knowledge and thrilling technology—and they've arrived from another world to help humanity’s colonies. But not all is as it seems, and the price of the strangers' help may be the colony itself.
Re-reading the blurb after finishing the story, my reaction is that it's terribly misleading.
The novel opens with the crew of the ark ship Enkidu arriving at a world called Imir. It's in rough shape, basically being held together with duct tape and baling wire. Scans reveal that the terraformers weren't able to finish their work, not by a longshot. The crew and still-in-cryosleep colonists had to accept that their prospects looked bleak and full of hardship, but the alternative was certain death in space.
We then fast forward decades later. The settlement on Imir is just getting by. Most people are farmers and there's a smattering of education, but only during the winter. Machines are breaking down, and the fabricators that make parts for the machines are breaking down. The last shuttle, cobbled together from parts cannibalized from other craft, sits idle, a ruined relic. There's no going back to the Enkidu, still in orbit over Imir, to find either tools or spare parts.
Our first narrator is Liff, a young girl of thirteen. She claims to have seen her grandfather, Captain Holt, but she's told he's been dead for years. She's intrigued by her teacher, Miranda, a woman who's ventured into the settlement from one of the far off farms as her family can no longer till the land.
Miranda is, in fact, a member of the crew of the Skipper from the Human collective of humans, spiders, squid, and interlocutors from Children of Ruin—with each of the non-humans being in human form. Miranda, an interlocutor, is our second narrator.
Our third narrators are Gethli and Gothi, a pair of corvids (crows) from Rourke, another planet the terraformers started working on but ultimately came up short of their goals. The corvids reminded me of Heckle and Jeckle (same family as crows, but technically magpies) rather than the two crows from Rick & Morty, but with a greater degree of intelligence. We learn about them through a flashback.
The story proceeds fairly well to about the 35% mark when events on the settlement reach what should be a dramatic turning point. But that's when Tchaikovsky sends us to a flashback to learn about the origins of Gethli and Gothi. That's fine; authors do that. But when the flashback is done we start rehashing the main story as if the dramatic event hadn't happened. It didn't make sense. Was this in the past? Was this later and Tchaikovsky is going to make us wait to explain what happened? It went on and on. I realized that not only was Liff an unreliable narrator but so was Miranda! The crows, who only commented on people and events they'd observed in their cryptic fashion, were the only semi-reliable narrators.
It wasn't until 80% that the big reveal cleared up why Liff and Miranda were unreliable narrators. It wasn't satisfying, but it did explain things. And then there was another big reveal after that which made the story even less satisfying.
At this point, it stops being a story and more of a self-indulgent debate on the nature of sentience. He doesn't even present it as clever sub-text; the characters are having this debate out in the open. It's the sort of thing you can get away with when you're a successful author with dozens of novels under your belt. It's a thing that I've seen a fair amount of in publishing. Once you become a cash cow, you're free to do whatever you want because the name on the cover is more important than the story within.
2 stars
\_/
DED
