This book is the third in a series that started with Dogs of War, which was probably my favourite story of 2017. You can read it as a standalone as well, I think, but it definitely helps to have the context from Dogs and 2021's Bear Head. Because this is a story of a world that's broken, and about the results of best intentions in trying to fix it from far, far away. Because this is a post-collapse Earth. One where we all just fought each other a little too long, and a little too hard. Where hubris and cruelty edged out empathy and humanity, where faith and humanity lost out to CEO's burning rainforests to try and make themselves immortal. But, it's a world surrounded by marvels. Because before things got out of hand, there was Mars. A Mars colonised by genetically engineered life, and regular people, who managed to survive the collapse of Earth, build something together in the harshest conditions, and who are now casting an eye back toward where they came from. Or at least, some version of them did. Because the people who live on Mars, these days, are different to how we might remember them. But they're still people. Even the ones who aren't.
That includes a very diverse cast indeed, a crew of adventurers looking to answer a call for help from Bees. The distributed intelligence called Bees, you see, helped save Mars once, when it was falling into collapse, and now a version of Bees is somewhere on Earth, calling for help. And so help is coming. Help looks like a reptilian sniper with an attitude problem, who can dial their own internal temperature up and down to move from cold strategy sessions to explosive action at the twitch of a dial. And A Dog, a canine hybrid originally built for war, now looking to build something new. And a couple of regular humans, whose ability to survive on the grounds of post-Collapse earth is rather open to question. Because this isn't the place their ancestors left, no. There's shades of A Canticle for Leibowitz here in a monastery that worships Bees, in the raiding gang of bunker dwellers obsessed with their own ideas of chivalry, while holding a dark secret in their hears, in the Factory, a place which keeps turning out Dogs, both as protection and as a means of influence, even when they no longer quite fit in a world reduced to subsistence agriculture in the ruins of abundance.
Man, Tchaikovsky has a lot going on. He's always had big ideas, and this is definitely a whole mixture of them. But it's also an adventure, as our band of adventurers try to help, and even as they work on making things better, the sparks they use to do that may set the world on fire. The story combines high-concept thought with some adrenaline-soaked action, with a dash of philosophy and a desire to ask big questions. As both the Martians and those they've come to help struggle with whether they want help, whether they should help, what happens next - and in some cases, what the consequences of action will be. Because four travellers may change the world, and not necessarily for the better. In fairness, the characters...oh, Tchaikovsky has always had a gift for off-kilter viewpoints, and here we are again, as he puts us into heads which are familiar, in a way, and also strange in others, with drives we can't always entirely fathom, but where understanding is always seemingly just within reach. It's smart, and its different and it may give you a headache.
The post-apocalypse narrative carries a familiar framework, if perhaps not a familiar conclusion, and the paths wended through the story are replete with both surprises and moments of genuine wonder. It is, in a word, a Tchaikovsky book, and as with all of them, it's a bloody good time, and definitely worth picking up.
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