The Doors of Eden (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

The Doors of Eden
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Pan
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: When English college students Lee and Mal set off into the moors in search of a mysterious monster, it was supposed to be the usual cryptid hunt: poking about in obscure places and backwater villages, gathering odd stories from eccentric locals, maybe snapping a grainy photo or two that might resemble something unnatural or may just be swamp gas or an odd shadow. Neither ever expected to actually find anything. But this trip, something goes terribly, impossibly wrong. Lee comes back alone, shaken to her core by what she witnessed, and Mal... Mal simply disappears, as if into thin air.
Years later, Lee gets a strange phone call from her missing friend, just as a pair of MI-5 agents are called upon to investigate unusual occurrences surrounded one of the world's top theoretical mathematicians, peculiarly inhuman agents start turning up all across England, and a shady tycoon makes an unprecedented bid for power just as the world stands on the brink of literal oblivion... and not just our world. The strange events are linked to a series of other worlds, other Earths, with other ascendant life forms - and all of them are in grave danger.

REVIEW: The Doors of Eden explores the possibilities of alternate worlds and evolutionary tracks, with unexpected successes and failures up and down the timeline, in a fairly active plot with hints of a spy thriller around the edges. The other Earths produce sapient life forms as bizarre and unknowable as any extraterrestrial, but all drawn from our planet's fossil record and the possibilities it entails, from essentially immortal giant trilobites meandering through space to overpopulated rodents in continent-spanning cities to nominally extinct amphibious beings who built a planet-sized supercomputer based on ice to accommodate an artificial afterlife on their perpetually frozen world, though the main players in this tale are generally of the human persuasion. Sometimes the characters could be irritating and a little slow on the uptake - Lee in particular often feels like a useless tagalong, and MI-5 agent Julian leans a little too hard into the stiff-upper-lip British agent persona who willfully refuses to broaden his thinking beyond his sworn duty to England when the entire multiverse hangs in the balance - and toward the end it feels like it's trying a little too hard and dragging things out a hair too long (not to mention hammering home its point about the diversity of life and minds being a boon rather than a threat a bit too repetitively, for all that it's very relevant in a world that seems to be turning backwards and inwards to its detriment), but there are also some great moments of sheer wonder and a real connection to the other sapients, who even in their alienness evoke a certain empathy.

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