The Doors of Eden

From the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden is an extraordinary feat of the imagination and a page-turning adventure about parallel universes and the monsters that they hide.
They thought we were safe. They were wrong.
Four years ago, two girls went looking for monsters on Bodmin Moor. Only one came back.
Lee thought she'd lost Mal, but now she's miraculously returned. But what happened that day on the moors? And where has she been all this time? Mal's reappearance hasn't gone unnoticed by MI5 officers either, and Lee isn't the only one with questions.
Julian Sabreur is investigating an attack on top physicist Kay Amal Khan. This leads Julian to clash with agents of an unknown power - and they may or may not be human. His only clue is grainy footage, showing a woman who supposedly died on Bodmin Moor.
Dr Khan's research was theoretical; then she found cracks between our world and parallel Earths. Now these cracks are widening, revealing extraordinary creatures. And as the doors crash open, anything could come through.
"Tchaikovsky weaves a masterful tale... a suspenseful joyride through the multiverse." (Booklist)

Title: The Doors of Eden

Author: Adrian Tchaikovksy

Genre: Sci-Fi

Paperback: 640 pages

Publication Date: 09/22/2020

Publisher: Orbit

Language: English

ISBN: 0316705802

ISBN-13: ISBN13: 9780316705806

GOODREADS

My Review

Eden, such a powerful word: to some, it's a name, to others, an imaginary thing or altogether, a place of delight and contentment laden with cosmological or eschatological imagery. In Tchaikovsky's THE DOORS OF EDEN, it is the inception of many worlds that began like ours with a differentiating evolutionary timeline and development with variant extinctions. A novel that combines fantasy, realism, science, technology, and history into a readable feast for the mind and senses. A modern sci-fi thriller that the father of science fiction novels H.G. Wells would have loved to bits.

Foreword: To lost chances.
The book begins with a pictorial timeline of evolution beginning 565 million years ago in the Ediacaran Period, proceeding through the main Eras to our Modern Day. A Prelude on Speculative Evolution and Intelligence sets the reader up for the scientific parts of the novel explaining our evolution and poses ideas of variations to what we know. This storyline alters in interludes with the actual thrilling plot of characters who will come in contact with parallel earths via cracks in the fabric of time throughout the end of the novel in 4 parts.

Most fascinating is Tchaikovsky's use and combination of biological processes that hold true to their mechanisms and initiation but by chance or lack of predation and other circumstance develop perhaps plausibly, I can't say, differently in his imagination. Survival of the fittest, each species at a given time, a pose of redevelopment and adjustment from the first to the last creature and various ways every time.

"What if - bear with me - a civilization of gigantic immortal spacefaring trilobites didn't evolve? I know, it seems hardly credible, but imagine if you will.
Our own timeline shared the events of the trilobites' time until it didn't. Until that point in a shared Cambrian where the arthropods sealed their eternal dominance in their version of history. Whereas in our timeline, the plucky vertebrate descendants survived and prospered and went on to..."

"By the time the dinosaurs of your world are glancing anxiously up at the sky in case that dot has grown larger since yesterday, there is only one eurypterid way of life across the globe: a fierce one. The territoriality that one marked individuals is now espoused by communities. Each clawed polity knows only two states: war today or preparation for war tomorrow. A fight for resources is subsumed into a fight for us against them."

As the (very) leisure and fascinated geek of geological timelines and evolution, I enjoyed the presentation and concepts of the different developments in this novel. Though fictitious, this added food for thought and more ground for the storyline to stand on, which all begins with Lee and Mal. They are friends turned to lovers since childhood and have a knack for the supernatural. Together they travel to the three stones of the Six Brothers and after witnessing a gruesome, bloody scene, Mal disappears among the fog, never to be found. Years later, Lee receives a phone call out of the blue that sounds like Mal but she can't be sure. When the two of them end up meeting, Mal has changed physically and quickly Lee becomes swept up in a world very different from ours/hers: a very dangerous one, at that!

From there the story is told with other pov’s independently. There is the brilliant, transgender Dr. Kay Amal Khan who started her career in Defence Science & Technology. Along with Julian and Royce who are part of the counter-terrorism watch, they have been trying to trace illegal shipments, extraterrestrial occurrences, artificial intelligence, and strange disappearances.

From a completely different view, we learn of the voice of other worlds, their thoughts, and the wars fought among. But cracks are happening and creatures begin to cross over between the other Earths in various stages and developments that differ drastically from ours. So, it is that in one world the rats have become this armored dominating force, whereas, in others, bird-like men are trying to mend the broken cracks. And as in any good story and world, there are the bad guys fighting for the ultimate dominance of it all.

In a culminating fight for survival, Lee, Mal, and the other characters converge in dangerous ways to save their respective worlds and some have to pay the price.

Tchaikovsky's brilliant imagination is brimming with ideas and full of what-ifs. Tethering on our knowledge, combined with speculative fiction, this sci-fi read not only considers expansion but also affords a look into the past. Though I didn't connect with some of the action sequences as much, this book was an amazing reading choice for me and had me all giddy over the speculative evolution and intelligence. The writing was superb and the storylines skillfully crafted to a culminating conclusion. If all his books are this good, then my library will be growing quickly as I'll be sure to read all his other works.

This is the perfect book for science and sci-fi geeks, though the thrilling plot can also be enjoyed by those who love exhilarating reads.

Highly recommend!