Bee Speaker by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Another brilliant read from Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovsky is the most prolific author working in today’s science fiction field. He also consistently manages to create engaging adventure stories combined with thought-provoking ideas. As a case in point, last year’s Alien Clay spun a tale of political prisoners incarcerated on a planet with a deadly – and very strange – biosphere, while also subverting and reimagining what it is to be a dissident and how the systems of power created to grind down opposition can be rendered useless with a shift in perspective. Likewise, the latest instalment in his Children’s Series – Children of Memory – has a multi-species crew (including humans and portiid spiders) trying to unravel the mystery of a human colony that shouldn’t exist while narratively dissecting what it means to be sentient, the different modes of sentience that can arise and how easy it is to ascribe sentience to something when it’s not really there.
Bee Speaker is the third instalment of Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War Series, driven by another big idea about ‘uplifted animals’ that have been operated on to create intelligence and sometimes physically changed as well in order to better do humanity’s bidding. The creation of an animal slave species is obviously an ethical minefield, which is explored in earlier books in the series. But in the world of Bee Speaker, time has moved on and animal ‘bioforms’ have been emancipated and are viewed as ‘people’ just like everybody else – at least on the nascent human colony on Mars, where humans had to operate on and change their own biology to survive.
While Earth has slid into a post-apocalyptic dark ages with different groups struggling for control or simple survival, Mars’s colony was guided away from certain doom by the intervention of Bees – a distributed intelligence existing across an uplifted swarm of actual bees.
The colony on Mars don’t know much about what’s happening on Earth as most of the technology that could transmit a signal to them has broken down during the collapse. But then they receive a distress call from ‘another’ Bees and send a small group to help. That’s when things start to go wrong.
The post-collapse landscape of Earth is peppered with different groups: bunker-dwellers who horde the weapons they’ve stockpiled in order to lord it over everyone else; bioform factories which stand as islands of still-functioning tech from the before times; an apiary run by an order of monks, devoted to preserving what knowledge of old Earth they can; and simple villagers trying to build a life on whatever tracts of less-polluted land they can salvage. But none of these things is exactly what it seems, just like none of the people the Martians meet can be taken on face value.
Tchaikovsky pushes these familiar post-apocalyptic scenarios into new and sometimes surprising territory, while also delivering an action-filled tale as the Martian team – which features two very entertaining bioforms, the ‘good dog’ Wells and the insanely contrary ‘dragon’ Irae – try to make sense of things and help who they can without getting killed in the process. But within all that, there’s also a fascinating inspection of distributed intelligence, what it can be and do, and how it might be a danger to every living thing on Earth. Because while Bees is the only distributed intelligence on Mars, Earth is far older and far more complex.
Bee Speaker is another top-notch science fiction tale from an author who – at least so far – can do no wrong.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Head of Zeus who provided me with an Advance Review Copy.
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