I am a huge Tchaikovsky fan, mostly as I love his hard sci fi and incredible world building. I normally shy away from any fantasy but his city of last chances trilogy (now turning into a quadrilogy/on its was to 5??) is one of the absurdist Pythonesque and actually funny series I’ve read in years (although the first one is legitimately hard to parse/read given the style). Still, the juice is worth the squeeze and the second in the series I found hilarious.
The Children of (insert adjective) series by Adrian Tchaikovsky is really, really good, especially the second in the series. Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.
I have a spider phobia, and struggled not to put the book down at first!
But the concepts and writing are excellent... really engaging stuff. And by the end of the book I'd learned so much about spiders that I honestly felt less scared of them! Definitely not cured by any means, but a year on and I still fear them less than I used to.
Alien Clay is also fantastic. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I think it gives the best intuition I’ve seen for a scientific concept that can be difficult to really grok otherwise.
The elephant's dad was such a fascinating creature, and the way he described it keening in the distance at night reminded me of the amalgamation creatures from Annihilation. I loved Alien Clay – I hope we get a sequel because the world was so interesting.
It'd be (insert noun) and the first one is far and away the best but on the big picture you are absolutely correct that it is fantastic. Children of Time (first one) is maybe my favorite book ever.
Yes Children of Time is very good. Tchaikovsky is excellent at portraying alien/non-human minds. You can tell he studied zoology and psychology at university.
Children of Time so very good, it is in the top 5 of my favorite books of all time. I enjoyed the second one as well, and found the third one to be a bit inconsequential and I didn't re-read it when I re-read part 1 and 2.
> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.
Apart from "Solaris", which many probably know because there's been a reasonably well-known movie, I recommend "Fiasco" by the same author, Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by Stanisław Lem. Spoiler: It does not end well. The aliens are too alien, and the humans do what humans often do.
This short story is set in the same universe as Tchaikovsky's excellent "Shroud" novel and in fact it's the same ship. I wonder where it sits in the chronology because I think the ending of Shroud surely permits an interesting sequel.
But the concepts and writing are excellent... really engaging stuff. And by the end of the book I'd learned so much about spiders that I honestly felt less scared of them! Definitely not cured by any means, but a year on and I still fear them less than I used to.
Apart from "Solaris", which many probably know because there's been a reasonably well-known movie, I recommend "Fiasco" by the same author, Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by Stanisław Lem. Spoiler: It does not end well. The aliens are too alien, and the humans do what humans often do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)
I feel this is one of the reasons I liked Fire upon the Deep with the group mind based Tines