Book rec: Shadows of the Apt series
Oct. 27th, 2015 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frith_in_thornsWhy you should all be reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series
This 10-book epic fantasy series kind of ate my life this summer. And then I surfaced to find that most of my friends have never heard of it, so I feel the need to correct that.
This post is as vague-squee as possible - if other people have read this series and want to talk about spoiler things (yes please! please talk to me!) I'd be really happy to put another post up.
So. These books are set in a world on the cusp of industrial/steampunk revolution, where all the people are part-insect. Yes, you read that right. Everyone has a "kinden", which is an insect genus with which they are linked and share characteristics. So beetle-kinden are stout and industrious, ant-kinden are fiercely insular, warlike and can talk to each other through a mindlink, fly-kinden are about 3 feet tall and can fly, wasp-kinden shoot fire from their hands, etc. This is all just a given. There are also lingering traces of magic which barely anyone believes in anymore, and conflict between old world powers and new, as the ancient past continues to inform the current-day societies.
The actual plot is that the wasp-kinden have formed into an empire and are set on conquering the rest of the world. The world being quite large and full of lots of styles of governance, this is a quite ambitious prospect. Most of the main characters in the first couple of books come from Beetle-Oxford, but the cast expends significantly. (And sometimes tragically contracts, as one would expect.) The worldbuilding is huge and detailed -- the world feels like a vast, divided, real place.
The characters are lovely, and the gender parity is SO refreshing in this genre. There's an earnest young scholar who's earnestly trying to live up to her friends. There are ambitious young women who want far more than they have. There's an incredibly broody and melodramatic master duellist who lives for honoooour. There are lots of deliciously complicated "enemy" wasps. There's a young earnest magician who falls desperately short of Chosen One. There's a character who manages to Nice Guy™ right over the Moral Event Horizon in an amazing train-wreck fashion.
Also there's lots of politics. And duels. And battles. The author is a performance sword-fighter and a LARPer, and both of these things really come through with great effect. There's some romance, but it's quite lightly handled, which I appreciate. There are NO descriptions of rape. (Some threat, but not overused IMO.) Also no queer characters, which is a shame and I think the series' biggest flaw. (I actually asked the author about this on twitter, and he responded that it's definitely a mistake on his part and something he's trying to do better on in subsequent books. Which is A++ response.)
CONCLUSION: YOU SHOULD READ THESE BOOKS. AND THEN SQUEE WITH ME!
This 10-book epic fantasy series kind of ate my life this summer. And then I surfaced to find that most of my friends have never heard of it, so I feel the need to correct that.
This post is as vague-squee as possible - if other people have read this series and want to talk about spoiler things (yes please! please talk to me!) I'd be really happy to put another post up.
So. These books are set in a world on the cusp of industrial/steampunk revolution, where all the people are part-insect. Yes, you read that right. Everyone has a "kinden", which is an insect genus with which they are linked and share characteristics. So beetle-kinden are stout and industrious, ant-kinden are fiercely insular, warlike and can talk to each other through a mindlink, fly-kinden are about 3 feet tall and can fly, wasp-kinden shoot fire from their hands, etc. This is all just a given. There are also lingering traces of magic which barely anyone believes in anymore, and conflict between old world powers and new, as the ancient past continues to inform the current-day societies.
The actual plot is that the wasp-kinden have formed into an empire and are set on conquering the rest of the world. The world being quite large and full of lots of styles of governance, this is a quite ambitious prospect. Most of the main characters in the first couple of books come from Beetle-Oxford, but the cast expends significantly. (And sometimes tragically contracts, as one would expect.) The worldbuilding is huge and detailed -- the world feels like a vast, divided, real place.
The characters are lovely, and the gender parity is SO refreshing in this genre. There's an earnest young scholar who's earnestly trying to live up to her friends. There are ambitious young women who want far more than they have. There's an incredibly broody and melodramatic master duellist who lives for honoooour. There are lots of deliciously complicated "enemy" wasps. There's a young earnest magician who falls desperately short of Chosen One. There's a character who manages to Nice Guy™ right over the Moral Event Horizon in an amazing train-wreck fashion.
Also there's lots of politics. And duels. And battles. The author is a performance sword-fighter and a LARPer, and both of these things really come through with great effect. There's some romance, but it's quite lightly handled, which I appreciate. There are NO descriptions of rape. (Some threat, but not overused IMO.) Also no queer characters, which is a shame and I think the series' biggest flaw. (I actually asked the author about this on twitter, and he responded that it's definitely a mistake on his part and something he's trying to do better on in subsequent books. Which is A++ response.)
CONCLUSION: YOU SHOULD READ THESE BOOKS. AND THEN SQUEE WITH ME!
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Date: 2015-10-27 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-27 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-27 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-27 08:57 pm (UTC)Great series written a while ago...
Date: 2015-10-27 10:49 pm (UTC)Re: Great series written a while ago...
Date: 2015-10-28 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-29 02:10 am (UTC)(Seriously, I don't remember the last time a long book series got me this hard in the first book. I'm already at a level of emotional investment that it usually takes me 3 or 4 books to achieve.)
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Date: 2015-10-29 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-29 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-29 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-28 01:57 pm (UTC)Sometime within the past year I came across enthusiastic posts about this series - and then couldn't remember who had written them. Was it you? Ah well, whoever it was wrote so glowingly that I had to check it out the series for myself. I'm just partway through Book 2, and it is wondrous! So thank you for this post, even if you weren't the person who wrote all the other ones *grin*
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