The Doors of Eden - Adrian Tchaikovsky

 This was my first Tchaikovsky.   To be fair, I'd only recently come across him.   A 99p Kindle deal opened the door and I had already secured my next Tchaikovsky before finishing this one.

Two lesbian crytozoographers are seeking monsters on Bodmin Moor when something happens.   Mal disappears completely, Lee is left alone in London.   Four years later Mal gets back in touch - a different Mal, tougher, fitter, and with what looks like a Neanderthal in tow.   Meanwhile transsexual maths genius Kay Amal Khan is attacked by rightwing loons.   This draws the attention of MI5's Julian Sabreur and his partner Alison Matcham, whose boss Leslie Hind is fixated on a techno-billionaire called Rove, who is somehow involved.

Thus we are drawn into a multiverse which is literally coming apart at the seams.   We discover other Earths which have diverged from ours and are populated by very different evolutionary outcomes.   Tchaikovsky's first stroke of genius is to seduce us with scholarly interludes in which these branches of the Darwinian tree are outlined by Professor Ruth Emerson of the Uinversity of California.   These, she reminds us, are not our Earth - and Professor Emerson is not entirely what she seems.   The second stroke of genius are multiple-choice solutions for the threatened universes, all of them set out in alternate Chapter 17s.

The sheer inventiveness drew me in.   Then there is the scientific/technological depth on one hand, the wit with which leading characters like Lee and Khan are handled.   I normally baulk at books this long but I enjoyed every minute of The Doors of Eden.   Highly recommended. 

Transition - Iain Banks

The problem with sci fi is that there is a balance needs to be struck between big idea and human interest.  So far as I am concerned Arthur C Clarke never found it, albeit his ideas were admittedly huge.  Transition isn't officially sci fi, in that Banks hasn't used his middle initial, his usual sci fi signature.  Perhaps he considered it more of a dystopian novel.  If so it is a multiverse dystopia.  His polished narrative skills just about got me through the 450 pages, and there were many passages of great interest, but there was no human interest, absolutely none, and that was a huge disappointment.

The crux of the matter is there are too many central characters spread across too many parallel Earths, none of them emotionally engaged with any other.  None have any engaging human traits and all are, to a greater or lesser extent, servants of the all-powerful Concern - the ubiquitous future-Nazis of far too many similar works.  Their means of travel - the titular transition - is trite, a device for getting them out of any peril at the speed of thought.  The consequences of the device are blithely ignored by Banks whereas for me that would have been the key to human interest - what does the non-transitioner make of the fact that their loved one's body has evidently been taken over by someone from a parallel world?

I can't deny Banks' narrative gifts but Transition has put me off any of his overt sci fi and I shall carefully check the nature of any of his straight novels before taking the plunge again.