Engines of Reason by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by tordotcom on September 1, 2026

Engines of Reason is a sequel to Elder Race. The story will probably make little sense to readers who aren’t familiar with the first book.

Earth colonized a number of planets before it collapsed. After Earth recovered, its anthropologists visited the colonized planets. Nyr is an anthropologist on the planet Sophos 4, whose inhabitants have forgotten their origin. The local governments are primitive and the largest one is ruled by a dynasty.

Nyr lives in a tower that communicates with an orbiting satellite, but he hasn’t heard from Earth in quite a long time. Prior to Elder Race, he spent most of his time sleeping and waiting for instructions from an Earth that might again have collapsed. In Elder Race, Nyr saves Sophos 4 from someone who has discovered how to activate machines from Earth and use them for destructive ends. Because Nyr can control monstrous technology, he is viewed as a wizard.

Engines of Reason picks up the story many years after Elder Race ends. A young woman who implored Nyr to help her in Elder Race learned some secrets of his wizardry but disregarded his jealous advice not to marry a lout. Nyr and Lyn have been estranged ever since, but they reunite when Sendra appears, claiming to be a wizard.

Sendra is a charlatan, but the person who empowered him with the secrets of technology — Ilmoth the Elder — seems to be Nyr’s equal. Ilmoth is determined to conquer (or destroy) Sophos 4, and Nyr will need to team with Lyn and her daughter Sara to save the planet.

Taken together, Elder Race and Engines of Reason impress me as some of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s best work. The theme of an undeveloped society mistaking technology for magic is nicely developed, the relationship between Nyr and Lyn is complex, and the mystery of Ilmoth’s ability to control technology adds a new dimension to the story. The theme of self-sacrifice that made Nyr such an endearing character in Elder Race is reinforced in the sequel.

Science fans who haven’t read Elder Race might want to pick up that book and follow it with the sequel. Fans of the first novel will likely enjoy Engines of Reason as a tasty new treat.

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Preaching to the Choir by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by Solaris on August 11, 2026

Adrian Tchaikovsky created two earlier series of novellas that fall under the “Terrible Worlds” umbrella. Preaching to the Choir is the first of a three-part “Terrible Worlds: Transformations” series that explore the consequences of change. Each can be read as a standalone.

Preaching to the Choir is an old-fashioned horror story with a modern twist that takes a not-so-subtle shot at British aristocracy (and by extension, oligarchs and tech billionaires). Perhaps inspired by Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away” (a story to which the novella refers), this is the story of a gift that requires beneficiaries to make a moral choice. To accept the gift, they must inflict harsh consequences upon others to feed their power.

Elena Mendes is studying medicine at Johns Hopkins. Her boyfriend, Ross Enderbough Junior the Third, invites her to his family reunion in England. The Enderbough family is stinking rich, but they avoid the public limelight. They are the power behind the throne, the advisors and movers who get things done — things that benefit the wealthy — without seeking the kind of political power that might expose them to accountability.

The family is divided into three groups (they dine at separate tables): “old as balls,” middle-aged, and relatively young. They get together for a ritual reunion every 87 years for reasons that Ross and Elena come to understand as the story develops. Outsiders are not invited and the older and middle-aged members of the family are quite distressed that Ross invited Elena to tag along. Before her stay is over, Elena will learn the family’s secret.

The horror lies in the true nature of the Enderbough clan. I won’t spoil the surprise, but it explains the remarkable longevity and financial success of the family members.

Elena must eventually make a moral choice. Whether she will choose to benefit herself at the expense of innocent others or sacrifice power to preserve her good conscience is for the reader to learn.

I always enjoy Adrian Tchaikovsky’s storytelling ability. This novella is less creative than much of his science fiction has been, perhaps because he adheres to the conventions of horror stories. For that reason, I didn’t find it to be particularly frightening. I nevertheless appreciated Tchaikovsky’s view of aristocratic power as founded in greed by people who give little thought to the harm they cause to others. That, after all, is the true horror.

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Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by Tor Books on June 23, 2026

Talking animals are normally the stuff of fantasy or fables, often pitched to children, with such notable exceptions as Animal Farm and Watership Down. Adrian Tchaikovsky found a way for science fiction noir to tell a talking animal story.

The animals in Green City Wars are genetically engineered. Bioengineered modifications include voice boxes to enable speech and fingers to enable work. A drug called Plangent boosts their intelligence, but it needs to be replenished now and then to keep the animals from reverting to their normal state. Animals work in exchange for Plangent and for buttons used as currency.

Normal instincts have been overridden by programming that replaces the desire to eat members of other species with a moral code that includes service to humanity. Humans think of servant animals as Little Helpers but the animals stay out of sight because humans find it disturbing to see them. A rat might be a Little Helper but nobody wants to see one working as a busboy.

Given sufficient Plangent, most animals are at least as bright as a dull human but an important mouse in the story is a true genius. Most animals speak rudimentary languages that have been created to suit them, although birds often speak several languages, birds being good at making and imitating sounds. Some animals worship a human deity named Jeff.

Tchaikovsky devoted an impressive amount of world building to the creation of Green City Wars. The world is a future Earth. After people came to their senses about the climate crisis, they remodeled the world to make it green. Cities are now integrated into forests and powered by solar energy. Towers that house homes and businesses are covered in bark and vines. And hidden away, animals do all the hard work, leaving humans to pursue their leisure activities.

The animals live in the roots beneath the cities or underground, briefly popping into human space to clean the streets at night or clear restaurant tables after diners finish their meals. Underground animals process waste, handle the sewage system, and keep the electrical grid working.

Rule One, understood by every animal, is Don’t Bother the Humans. Don’t even be noticed by them. Stay in your place, do your job, and you’ll both earn Plangent and be fed for your natural lifetime, which is rather brief in the case of mice and rats.

Unbeknownst to humans, who can skate by without working if they choose, the animals that replaced them as laborers have developed their own economy, complete with the equivalent of labor unions and mob bosses. Red squirrels are at war with gray squirrels, but it’s a hidden war to accommodate Rule One. Animals operate the farms and divert produce to their own markets when it doesn’t meet human standards. They sell table scraps. Smart animals have learned how to hack their internal software so they can enjoy coffee.

The world Tchaikovsky built is so entertaining that it doesn’t require much of a story, but the noir plot does not disappoint. The protagonist is a raccoon named Scotch. His genetic engineering might add extra years to his lifespan, but he doubts that he will live to be a wise old raccoon, given the messes he’s made. He got tired of the corporate life Uzco offered him as a trash gatherer and wiring repairer (“dexterous little hands” help him with the latter job) — a life that included ready access to Plangent — so he became a freelancer, a combination of private detective and fixer. He’s always hustling to avoid running out of Plangent and returning to beast status. But like any good detective/fixer, he’s adept at making connections and doing favors that he can later ask to be repaid.

Scotch’s supply of Plangent is running low when Benson, a large turtle who manages Uzco, offers him a return to work, complete with a promised supply of Plangent. The task will require him to work undercover. He is to find and bring to Benson a mouse named Dr. Meece. Benson doesn’t tell Skotch why he wants the mouse and, at least initially, Skotch doesn’t really care. The remuneration seems quite generous for a task that seems quite simple. Benson gives Scotch a sample of the mouse’s scent and off he goes.

The story places Scotch in conflict with other factions that also want Meece for reasons that Scotch learns only late in the story. It soon becomes apparent to Scotch that Meece is a super-genius who has invented something that will change the lives of animals forever — whether for better or worse, Scotch doesn’t know. He only knows that some animal factions want him dead and others want his dream to be realized. The factions include corporatists, anarchists, guilds, and religious sects.

Two assassins who want to terminate Meese are a stoatweasel named Szerky and a cat named Tybelle. The cat is actually a human’s pet and thus enjoys a protected status — or at least it wants to leave that impression. Scotch battles them both (he’s bigger than the cat but not nearly as fast) and finds himself warring at various times with both the gray and red squirrels. A few animals are on his side, particularly a pigeon named Uwe who also has a protected status as an informant to a human master. A possum named Maria might or might not be on his side.

Tchaikovsky gives his animal characters personalities that are consistent with their species. Scotch the raccoon has a reputation as a bandit but is well served by his cleverness. The pigeon is annoyingly loud and boisterous. A frog works in water reclamation, moles work underground, and so forth.

In an indirect way, much like Animal Farm, Green City Wars uses animals to indict an oppressive economic system — in this case, an allegorical indictment of unfettered capitalism. To explain why that’s true would require revealing Meese’s secret, but it is enough to know that Tchaikovsky put careful thought into the economic ramifications of a system based on the fear of losing Plangent if animals stop serving the needs of their bosses.

The economic allegory gives the story some weight, but it is at bottom an amusing story of talking animals. Tchaikovsky is amazingly prolific — he’s the modern version of Isaac Asimov in that regard — but he always finds a way to give a fresh spin to conventional ideas. Readers won’t need to be science fiction fans to enjoy Green City Wars — a love of animals, lively plots, or both will be enough.

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Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

First published in the UK in 2024; published by Orbit on September 17, 2024

Alien Clay imagines a world in which the process of evolution does not move ahead in fits and starts but proceeds in a steady stream that builds to an eventual frenzy. A world in which all life is linked, co-dependent, constantly changing by creating new symbiotic relationships and different kinds of merged entities. Each organism serves other organisms and is served in return.

Competition for survival drives evolution on Earth. On Kiln, survival depends on cooperation, on being useful to other entities. Still survival of the fittest, but the fittest are those that most capably join with other entities to make something better.

Tchaikovsky typically infuses his novels with philosophy. While Alien Clay explores what it means to be an individual human on a planet that invites cooperation with other species, its greater focus is on the evil of enforced orthodoxy, particularly when scientific outcomes are predetermined, not the product of science.

Arton Daghdev was a scientist on Earth, specializing in xenobiology and xeno-ecology. Earth, unfortunately, is governed by the Mandate, a political force that requires scientists to produce orthodox results, rather than the truth — results that show the inevitable superiority of humankind to all other life, for example.

The Mandate combines totalitarianism with something akin to theocracy. Scientists who veer away from the orthodox in favor of objective truth, who grumble about constraints on what they can publish, are labeled dissidents and are sent to work as laborers on colonized worlds. The worlds are harsh and prisoners tend not to live long, assuming they survive the journey and harrowing landing in their sleep capsules. Kiln is the most habitable of the worlds but it is a dangerous place.

Dhagdev’s resistance to the Mandate on Earth consisted of attending subcommittee meetings until someone ratted him out. Because — and this is a point Tchaikovsky makes repeatedly — there’s always someone willing to rat out fellow travelers in exchange for a promise of less pain. Someone ratted out Dhagdev and he woke up in a capsule falling toward Kiln.

Adrian Tchaikovsky likes to start with an interesting idea or two and build from there. The idea that a cooperative society might outperform a competitive one is an unorthodox view in science fiction. Its fans have been fed a steady diet of stories about clever humans who outthink (and thus outcompete) aliens. The idea that human society might not be as strong as an alien collective intelligence is untraditional and might be anathema to some science fiction fans. I mean, the Federation defeated the Borg, didn’t it?

Science fiction also has a long tradition of championing individualism. If there is a Mandate that unites science fiction traditionalists, Tchaikovsky might be violating it with a plot that ultimately embraces the concept of a hive mind (at least one that doesn’t destroy the sense of individual identity) as a design improvement rather than a threat. I suspect that Tchaikovsky is deliberately advancing unorthodox ideas to underscore his criticism of the Mandate’s orthodoxy. Ideas might be debated and rejected or reconsidered but they should never be suppressed.

Having laid those ideas as a foundation, what kind of plot does Tchaikovsky build? Not clever humans against an alien menace but open-minded humans rising up against their oppressor. Although Dhagdev is initially assigned to tasks the resemble the performance of science, his instinct to join an insurrection is punished with reassignment to a team of prisoners who are sent into the jungle. Excursion teams make first contact with complex structures that appear to have been erected by builders who can no longer be found on Kiln. The excursion teams clear the structures of plants that have overgrown the outer walls so that scientists can study them safely — in particular, lines of inscriptions that might or might not be a form of writing.

The Mandate does little to protect excursion team members from contamination by aggressive spores, spiky plants, and large beasts that stomp on humans. One of the original scientists has done nothing but babble since being infected by something outside the walls of the labor camp, but she refuses to die — and the person in charge of the camp prefers to study her rather than kill her.

So we have a plot that follows a rebellious scientist as he interacts with an ecosystem that he begins to understand on an internal level. Can he lead a rebellion? Not exactly, but Tchaikovsky puts a neat spin on the notion of leadership in a cooperative society. In any event, the plot gives Dhagdev a series of adventures and challenges that keep the story moving. It’s fun and at least modestly thought-provoking, a good combination for a science fiction novel.

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Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by Tordotcom on June 4, 2024

Service Model is an amusing story of a robot’s search for purpose. There has been an apocalypse (or a series of apocalyptic events) but it wasn’t caused by a robot revolution. In fact, quite the opposite. Since the cause of civilization’s collapse is the point of the novel, I won’t reveal it, but I will say that Adrian Tchaikovsky furthers the grand tradition of exploring big ideas through science fiction.  

Some humans have survived the end of civilization, but they are outnumbered by robots who follow their programming, carrying on with tasks that have become meaningless. They are increasingly starting to glitch, the end of civilization having had “a negative impact on scheduled updates.” They wander in circles, freeze in place when their memories are full, haul freight back and forth that never gets unloaded. Robots are lining up at repair centers for maintenance that will never be scheduled. Being dutiful robots, they stand in line until they stop functioning altogether.

The story’s protagonist is Charles, a valet robot who works in a manor for a wealthy recluse. Since his master no longer entertains or goes out, Charles maintains a social calendar that is empty and lays out clothing that is never worn. This does not bother Charles, who is content in his performance of useless tasks. Serving a human is all he wants to do, even if the service has no value.

One day, while Charles is shaving his master, he discovers that his master’s throat has been cut. Charles endeavors to go about his day — even reasoning that taking his dead master for a drive might cheer him up — before the majordomo that operates the house calls a robot doctor and a robot cop. Hilarity ensues.

Charles realizes he might have a fault that will require diagnostic intervention but hopes he won’t be sent into retirement. “Given the considerable investment in domestic service that Charles represented, surely he should be allowed to murder three, or even five people before being deemed irreparably unfit for service.”

The plot follows Charles as he searches for another human to serve. He makes his way to Diagnostics, where he hopes a software adjustment will make further murders improbable. He meets a girl who, by virtue of her attire, he mistakes for a robot. She introduces herself as The Wonk and tries to convince him that he has acquired the Protagonist Virus and is now self-aware and autonomous. Charles is certain he is neither of those.

Diagnostics is overcrowded with robots who will never be fixed, so Charles is sent to Data Compression, where it seems his fate is to be recycled. Fortuitous circumstances cause Charles to visit the Library, where all human knowledge is being stored, albeit in a way that makes more sense to robots than to humans. He later encounters a group of humans who would be at home in a Mad Max movie. In the last stop of his journey, Charles visits God.

While Service Model tells a funny story, Tchaikovsky makes some serious points. To preserve humanity’s past, humans held captive in the Library make a long circular commute to engage in meaningless make-work at workplaces next to their residences. Robots were supposed to make manual labor unnecessary, but how can humans be valued in the eyes of others if they don’t work?  The novel asks whether the employment of laborers is any different from ownership of robots. When a robot stops being productive, society discards it. Are humans any different? “Individual value is tied to production, and everyone who’s idle is a parasite scrounging off the state.” The homeless are treated no better than obsolete robots.

Tchaikovsky also has an interesting take on justice. How would one program a robot to mete out justice? In the end, wouldn’t a rational robot determine that everyone is guilty of something and that humans all deserve to be punished? The notion that it’s better to punish the innocent than to allow the guilty to get away with crime is antithetical to American and British values, but common enough among people who accept the authoritarian promise to protect them from imagined threats. And who would make a better authoritarian than a robot?

The story is ultimately about Charles’ search for purpose. Charles appears to frustrate The Wonk at every turn by insisting that his purpose is to serve because that is how he was programmed. And if serving others makes Charles feel fulfilled (a possibility Charles would never articulate because he does not “feel” anything), perhaps service is his purpose. Perhaps humans also have a predetermined purpose that requires no search. Perhaps we are all wired in a particular way and Charles is simply being more honest than humans who believe they can find a purpose through religion or philosophy. Yet the ending suggests that Charles might eventually work around his programming and determine his own purpose, one his programmer did not envision.

This is the first novel of Tchaikovsky’s I’ve read that is primarily a comedy. I’ve enjoyed his space opera and fantasy, but he is just as successful at humor. Tchaikovsky borrows ideas from Star Trek, Borges, A Canticle for Liebowitz, and the Wizard of Oz (among other sources), then milks them for their comedic potential. The story can be read as a cautionary tale about the potential causes of humanity’s destruction, but the end of civilization has never been funnier.

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