Scan barcode
A review by hadeanstars
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
3.0
I barely finished this.
It started well, and picked up seamlessly from the previous instalment - which was okay, if not amazing - so I was always in two minds about whether or not to read this at all, but I have been looking forward to reading some decent sci-fi for a while, hence I picked this up.
Tchaikovsky has a very fertile brain, brimming with ideas and concepts, and you are immediately on a bit of a rollercoaster ride through his wild imagination. You can almost feel the fizz and effervescence of his ideas bubbling and popping away. There is no shortage of originality here.
On the other hand, it feels like there is very little steadiness in his style. It feels like it needs an anchor, something to weigh it down and stop it brimming over with its own intellectual excitement. In the end it starts to become just a little too airy and zingy.
The book started really well and somewhere in the middle it seemed to get into its groove. There is a section where, on the planet Nod, an alien life form is encountered. The story became very creepy at this point, and an element of high-strangeness crept in. I was really engaged by this, because that is what I look for in good sci-if, concepts and experiences which are truly alien. But they also need to be rooted in some kind of emotional or visceral sensation. In my (very humble) opinion, the author really needs to work on making emotional connections with his characters. It is in the juxtaposition of the human and the alien that sci-fi stands or falls. Tchaikovsky does the alien very well, the human? Not so well, perhaps.
I rate this at 5/10. It’s good for the science and the excitement of sheer invention, but it fails - ultimately - because the characterisation is kind of weak.
It started well, and picked up seamlessly from the previous instalment - which was okay, if not amazing - so I was always in two minds about whether or not to read this at all, but I have been looking forward to reading some decent sci-fi for a while, hence I picked this up.
Tchaikovsky has a very fertile brain, brimming with ideas and concepts, and you are immediately on a bit of a rollercoaster ride through his wild imagination. You can almost feel the fizz and effervescence of his ideas bubbling and popping away. There is no shortage of originality here.
On the other hand, it feels like there is very little steadiness in his style. It feels like it needs an anchor, something to weigh it down and stop it brimming over with its own intellectual excitement. In the end it starts to become just a little too airy and zingy.
The book started really well and somewhere in the middle it seemed to get into its groove. There is a section where, on the planet Nod, an alien life form is encountered. The story became very creepy at this point, and an element of high-strangeness crept in. I was really engaged by this, because that is what I look for in good sci-if, concepts and experiences which are truly alien. But they also need to be rooted in some kind of emotional or visceral sensation. In my (very humble) opinion, the author really needs to work on making emotional connections with his characters. It is in the juxtaposition of the human and the alien that sci-fi stands or falls. Tchaikovsky does the alien very well, the human? Not so well, perhaps.
I rate this at 5/10. It’s good for the science and the excitement of sheer invention, but it fails - ultimately - because the characterisation is kind of weak.