People seem to really like Adrian Tchaikovsky. And I think if you described what he was doing to me, it sounds very appealing. Almost all of the Tchaikovsky I've read involves conflicts between different ways of thinking, which is one of my favorite things in fiction. And all of the Tchaikovsky I've read comes highly recommended: Elder Race, Ogres, Alien Clay, and Service Model were all Hugo finalists, and thus supposedly the best of what the genre has to offer; my other Tchaikovsky was Children of Time, which came highly recommended by the friend who loaned it to me, and is a perennial favorite on r/printSF.
But when I actually read them... something about them just doesn't work. I think Tchaikovsky is a perfectly good writer on the sentence level. But almost all of these books have left me cold at best, induced hatred at worse. I find that in particular
Children of Time,
Alien Clay, and
Shroud share some features. In all these books, you have humans from some kind of dystopian society who come to a planet with a new kind of alien intelligence. But the human characters... kind of don't matter?
Children of Time is the least worst on this score; in both
Alien Clay and
Shroud, I feel like Tchaikovsky sets up characters who
are interesting at the beginning, but then ultimately they don't amount to anything, they're just there to carry us through the alien consciousness. But hundred of pages of learning facts about how an alien consciousness works... that just doesn't appeal to me, especially when I find both
Shroud and
Alien Clay really heavy-handed about it: ooh, have humans overestimated their own superiority to other ways of thinking? Yes, they have. I feel like Tchaikovsky has interesting premises but nothing interesting to say about them.
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