Cage of Souls, paperback out October 3, 2019, reviewed

By @ Simon Cocking, review of Cage of Souls, paperback  out October 3, 2019 by Adrian Tchaikovsky  Available from Amazon here.

The sun is bloated, diseased, dying perhaps. Beneath its baneful light, Shadrapar, last of all cities, harbours fewer than 100,000 human souls. Built on the ruins of countless civilisations, Shadrapar is a museum, a midden, an asylum, a prison on a world that is ever more alien to humanity.

Bearing witness to the desperate struggle for existence between life old and new is Stefan Advani: rebel, outlaw, prisoner, survivor. This is his testament, an account of the journey that took him into the blazing desolation of the western deserts; that transported him east down the river and imprisoned him in the verdant hell of the jungle’s darkest heart; that led him deep into the labyrinths and caverns of the underworld. He will meet with monsters, madman, mutants.

The question is, which one of them will inherit this Earth?

Cage of Souls reviewed

The latest book by Adrian Tchaikovsky makes an interesting change to the last few we have reviewed  as it is set on earth, in the distant future. It is a long and entertaining romp through a few genres almost. The swamp atmosphere reminded us of Drowned World by JG Ballard, another tale set around an overheating, dying earth sun, with rising waters and swamp creatures too powerful for humans to fight. Then, when later on in the book he ends up in the underworld this reminded us of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 and beyond series, again with its own weird world of sub / semi and non human characters.

The prison sequences also evoked Papillon by Henri Charrière too, in their grinding inhumanity and disregard for human life. You could also even throw in Redmond O’Hanlon too, if you were thinking of slightly slapstick jungle commentaries too, with a wry narrator.

This book stands on its own two feet, but simply by switching between several different locations it did keep switching things around and making you wonder where it was going to go. Which is a good thing. With his main character and unreliable witness Stefan Advani, Adrian Tchaikovsky manages to create an engaging, believable and interesting character. At the very end, no plot spoiler alert, one of the remaining other characters reads his account and berates him for not telling the story accurately. Advani apologises and then adds a bit more, so enabling him to try to have his cake and eat it.

Advani is coauthor of an ecological treatise ‘How to save the planet’ so the gentle nod to climate change and what we are doing to our planet is there. However humanity has reached such a point of completely messed up and beyond the point of no return that it is clear that Advani’s book will achieve little beyond bringing a whole load of pain, suffering and death upon his friends and himself. The book is provocative and thought provoking, very much the speculative fiction that Tchaikovsky enjoys writing. As he explained himself ->

” it’s an interesting time for speculative fiction, because no matter what’s happening, SF and fantasy are invaluable tools to hold a (slightly distorted) mirror up to the world and tilt it back and forth to see what’s around the edges and what might be different.”

(See whole interview here)

This book aims to take you out of your comfort zone, and asks some hard questions about the future of mankind, humanity, and the other species we share our planet with. As you can imagine we, as a species do not fare too well, as our own base behaviour traits continue to dominate. Is there any hope for us?

We enjoyed reading this book, and it also inspired us to go out and follow up on some of the other authors that he finds as a good  source of inspiration including “Gene Wolfe, Ursula le Guin, Mary Gentle, Mervyn Peake: writers with a wealth of invention and a style I can frankly only envy. More recently, Justina Robson, China Mieville, Emma Newman are writing profoundly fascinating stuff.” As always the more you can read and engage with entertaining and enjoyable storytelling, the better we are for it. Especially as we continue to rush headlong into a future that we have not completely thought through yet.

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