2025/075: Bee Speaker — Adrian Tchaikovsky

[tamaranth]

2025/075: Bee Speaker — Adrian Tchaikovsky

It is truly amazing how many flavours of dumb an apocalypse can spawn. [loc. 1990]

Third in the series that began with Dogs of War and continued with Bear Head. The time is about two centuries after the events of Bear Head, and three generations after the fall of the Old ('the world that once was') due to failure of the global information network, in a 'deluge of artificially-generated false testimony' exarcerbated by climate disaster. Human existence on Earth is now rather dystopian, as a group of Martians discover when they respond to a distress call.

The Crisis Crew team consists of two humans (Tecomo and Ada) and two Bioforms -- genetically and biologically engineered animals, originally created to serve humans, now regarded as people and part of a thriving Martian society. One of the Bioforms is a Dogform, Wells, who is overwhelmed by the sheer sensory input of Earth: the other is a Dragonform, Irae, who is the best character in the book. (Not in a moral sense. Definitely not in a moral sense.)

The call they answered came from the Factory, which still makes dogforms (though their process is more brutal, less high-tech, than the original Bioforms). Cricket, a young monk from the Apiary (where they cherish and worship Bees), encounters the 'monsters' on his way to the Factory, and finds himself involved in momentous events. The inhabitants of the Griffin Bunker are determined to fight to preserve their feudal society; a Distributed Intelligence is roaming the countryside in a number of bodies; the monks have a secret, and the Bunker another.

I'm not super-keen on post-apocalyptic stories, but this was fun. There are nine narrators, each with a distinctive voice (an achievement in itself) and a different set of prejudices, beliefs, and traits. Four of those narrators identify as female, and there's a non-viewpoint character who is clearly trans. Though almost all of the story takes place on Earth, we get a good idea of how the Martian colony has evolved and transformed. Earth, meanwhile, is not devoid of Old People, which in this novel means a person from before the apocalypse.

Fascinating characters, clever plot, themes of transformation and of personhood -- and, of course, a close-knit team dealing with an alien, technologically-backward culture.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 5th June 2025.