Alien Clay
Adrian Tchaikovsky
That was a tedious, long slog
I admired Children of Time, the first novel in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, enough to read quite a few other books by Tchaikovsky. I have been almost uniformly disappointed. I say "almost" because I quite enjoyed his novella And Put Away Childish Things. What's more, with that one exception, the trend has been downward. The more recent a Tchaikovsky novel is, the less I enjoy it.
It is my feeling that Tchaikovsky has more or less given up writing novels. He writes novel-shaped treatises. He writes scientific/philosophical treatises, then forces a story around the points he wants to make. Often I feel I can can identify the philosopher who provoked a particular work. For instance, if you have read Children of Time, read this quote from Daniel C. Dennett
Nagel chose his target creatures well. Bats, as fellow mammals, are enough like us to support the conviction that of course they are conscious. (If he had written “What Is It Like to Be a Spider?” many would be inclined to wonder what made him so sure it was like anything at all.)
Alien Clay was particularly tedious to me because most of the insights Tchaikovsky has to convey concern biology and evolution, subjects in which I was professionally interested in my career as a scientist. Tchaikovsky repeatedly pulls the obvious out of his hat with great fanfare, and it gets old.
OK, 'Nuff said. I don't like writing long negative reviews, and I have made my feelings clear enough.