Recently I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Adrian Tchaikovsky, an eminent fantasy/ sci-fi writer, had written a sequel to his highly successful Children of Time. (I reviewed that book, mostly favorably, when it came out). It was a fascinating exploration of what it means to be human… from the perspective of sentient spiders.
Although I didn’t like some of Tchaikovksy’s creative and philosophical choices in the book, I really enjoyed it. The audiobook was well produced, all the characters were compelling, and the imagination present to create a fully-formed spider civilization was amazing.
So when book 2 came out, I was very excited. And when I found out that the next species to get “civilization treatment” was octopuses, I did a little happy dance (I like octopuses, ok?). But the second book, while excellently written and exciting and terrifying and absorbing, had a terrible ending.
The ending was symptomatic of a general modern problem–the “cutification” or explaining away of evil as something little more than a misunderstanding. I’ve already talked about this issue a little bit in a previous post. But I wanted to talk about this issue on video with you all on facebook, so I did!
Here’s the video of my latest book review/cultural rant.
Or, if you prefer to listen on audio only:
Did you know that I created an exclusive audio miniseries on the power of stories? Give it a listen!