The Doors of Eden

De: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Narrado por: Sophie Aldred

From the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden is an extraordinary feat of the imagination and an enthralling adventure about parallel universes and the monsters that they hide.

They thought we were safe. They were wrong.

Four years ago, two girls went looking for monsters on Bodmin Moor. Only one came back.

Lee thought she'd lost Mal, but now she's miraculously returned. But what happened that day on the moors? And where has she been all this time? Mal's reappearance hasn't gone unnoticed by MI5 officers either, and Lee isn't the only one with questions.

Julian Sabreur is investigating an attack on top physicist Kay Amal Khan. This leads Julian to clash with agents of an unknown power - and they may or may not be human. His only clue is grainy footage, showing a woman who supposedly died on Bodmin Moor.

Dr. Khan's research was theoretical; then she found cracks between our world and parallel Earths. Now these cracks are widening, revealing extraordinary creatures. And as the doors crash open, anything could come through.

"Tchaikovsky weaves a masterful tale...a suspenseful joyride through the multiverse." (Booklist)

©2020 Adrian Tchaikovsky (P)2020 Hachette Audio

Another Amazing Work from a Living Legend

I’ve loved every one of the many Tchaikovsky books I’ve read and this one is among the finest. I think the way he builds worlds with aspects of hard Sci-Fi, historical fiction, magical realism, and epic fantasy is in a class of its own. What a gem of a book & credit due also to the fabulous narrator. I hope to visit this storyline again. Truly wonderful.

in the end a beautiful reality

finding peace with chaos and realizing that chaos is infinite and exciting .. I enjoyed every single minute

Magical

Within the first chapter I felt that rare magic like I was entering the world of Narnia again for the first time. Excellent narration and a story that that will illicit wonder.

Loved it

Not Children of Time, but that’s almost impossible to top. The Doors of Eden was a fascinating peek behind the curtain ably explained by a series of lectures and then acted out real time by a host of characters. The “human” characters weren’t all cookie cutter, but were the real people we should all be familiar with by now - thank you for that!

Pretty Fun

The alternate evolutionary histories are tremendously entertaining. Hearing them get woven into the plot is rewarding.

Interesting

Obviously not as good as Children of Time, I do find it funny that even the compliment on the cover is actually refering to Children of Time.

I do still really enjoy it. Would of loved to spend more time on any of the other Earths. Or given us a couple chapters of Mal trying to live with the Lizard people, that would of been great. Even so i do feel enough is given for your mind to wonder and enjoy theorizing the different ways they could've lived. Like All Tomorrows in way. not a lot of info is given on each race, just enough for your mind wonder. even so kinda a long book if thats just what looking for. and the story was Meh...

“Vivre le difference,” but too much contrivance

Best friend lovers Lisa “Lee” Chandrapraiar (studying zoology) and Elsinore “Mal” Mallory (literature) are into “cryptozoology,” hunting legendary monsters (“crypoids”) on YouTube, when at 19 they get onto the trail of a “birdman,” visit a rural farm in the South of England, and at the site of three standing stones strangely called the Six Brothers discover that actually finding a monster brings terror and loss.

This starts the plot of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel The Doors of Eden (2020), which, in addition to Lee and Mal, features the genius mathematician/physicist Dr. Kay Amal Kahn, MI5 agents Alison “Matchbox” Matchell and Julian “Spiker” Sabreur, nationalist-fascist-xenophobe-homophobe wealthy businessman Daniel Rove and his military-veteran thug Lucas May, as well as an assortment of “monsters,” aliens from a variety of alternate Earths where alternate time lines have produced alternate evolutionary paths and sentient beings, from pacifist Neanderthals, dinosaur-bird-people, and rat-ferret-people to immortal vast spaceship trilobites, frozen fish computers, and an ediacran sponge thing covering an entire Earth. As a character says at one point, “Vivre le difference.” “Their Earth was part of a sequence of variables, each one branching off from the next… and now the principles that had separated them were failing.”

Yes, Tchaikovsky is developing a theme present in his sf like the Children trilogy and in his fantasy like Redemption’s Blade: although the alien Other is often terrifying, cultures are stronger in proportion to the amount of difference they accept from within and without. He likes to depict aliens interacting with each other as he tries to make us open our eyes and minds and get past difference to find common ground. Repeatedly in his work, he arranges things so that embracing the other leads to survival and thriving (“Difference is strength”), while remaining unable to handle “Bugs and monkeys and vermin and queers” leads to collapse and death.

Tchaikovsky excels at imagining different ways of living and being and thinking according to different environments and variables. Here he inserts between chapters excerpts from a book on alternate evolutionary paths of different Earths, with a variety of sentience and civilization, including scorpions, cockroaches, mollusks, trilobites, spiders, monkeys, and more. And his writing is clean, witty, and fast-paced.

However, I found this book less impressive than the others of his I’ve read. For one thing, he writes only human point of view characters (while I loved the spider and octopus and microorganism aliens of the Children trilogy). His point of view characters come in a varied group, but they’re all human and all British.

Furthermore, I regret his making the genius transgender mathematician-physicist Dr. Khan a foul-mouthed chain-smoker who doesn’t emit any genius vibe. The characterization of Khan is stereotypically female as a man and stereotypically male as a woman, and it’s never easy to believe that she is uniquely vital to the survival of multiple alternate Earths.

And for the sake of his non-stop frantic action plot, too many of his characters do unbelievable things given their character development, like Lee, Julian, and Alison being too xenophobic at key points, given their experiences and situations. And the reverse movement happens with the Neanderthal types, who early on perform (offstage) sensational ultra-violence in beating a few white nationalist thugs to death with furniture but later are said to be, due to their biology, environment, and culture, averse to conflict and violence.

A related problem is that the fractures between the alternate Earths are too plot convenient, letting Tchaikovsky do all sorts of suspense-inducing tricks at will by opening “doors” between Earths and instantly moving people into or out of tight spots or not opening “doors” and keeping people where they are. At one point he has his characters fall into our Earth on the 80th floor of a tall building and then makes them climb up 15 flights of stairs to the top while everything’s breaking apart around them, when he could have just had them fall into our Earth on the top of the building, but then that wouldn't be so exciting.

He works in plenty of popular culture references (because his story largely occurs in contemporary London), like Narnia, Star Wars, James Bond, Flatland, The Hills Have Eyes, The Lord of the Rings, Apocalypse Now. Such things are fun but fix this novel in time more than his Children trilogy.

Finally, Tchaikovsky does nifty things with alternate endings based on alternate choices made by the characters that along with the wonderful excerpts from the book on evolutionary biology in between chapters (almost) makes the book a four-star novel for me. But though I’ll surely read more books by him, this one was rather forgettable.

What an excellent piece of work

I read a few negative reviews that almost put me off from trying this book - what a loss that would have been. Like “The Children of Time” and its sequel “The Children of Ruin” I have never read an author that shows such breadth of vision when it comes to evolution, technology and the talent to blend these subjects into science fiction masterpieces. This book was an excellent piece of work, and became near impossible to pause.

Pretty Good, not his best work

I liked his other books "children of time" and "children of ri ruin". This one was good, but came up a little short of those in terms of story. I enjoyed the segments on speculative evolution; I thought those were very interesting and well-done. The story relied a bit too much on characters who were a little weak in terms of their development. The villain character is a little too cartoonishly evil, and some other characters felt like caricatures. Some parts of the story have a bit of a political subtext relating to contemporary issues like Brexit and lgbt rights. I was fine with those, but sometimes the message the author was trying to convey was kind of awkwardly shoehorned in.

Overall the narration was well-done and easy to follow. I would recommend the audiobook especially for those who enjoyed Tchaikovsky's previous books.

Great science fiction, concerning parenting

My only complaint is one that bothered me for over half the book. Why do Striker and Matchbox spare no thought to their children? Beyond establishing that they exist and, Matchbox remembering hers needed babysitting that one time, there was no thought given at any crisis or calm point.