Fiction Reviews
Bee Speaker
(2025) Adrian Tchaikovsky, Head of Zeus, £20, hrdbk, ix+438pp, ISBN 978-1-035-90145-6
From the Arthur C. Clarke award winner, Adrian Tchaikovsky, comes the third instalment of the 'Dogs of War' science fiction series, a future where genetically engineered “Bioforms” have inherited not the Earth, but the Solar System. The end of the world has been and gone. There was no one great natural disaster, no all-consuming world war, no catastrophic pandemic. Only scores of storms, droughts, and selfish regional conflicts. Humanity was not granted a heroic end. Instead, it bled to death from a thousand cuts.
But where Earth fell apart, Mars pulled together. Engineered men and beasts, aided by Bees – an outlawed distributed intelligence – survived through co-operation, because there was simply no alternative. Fast forward to today. A signal – 'For the sake of what once was. We beg you. Help.' – reaches Mars. How could they refuse? A consortium of Martian work crews gathers the resources for a mission: a triumphal return to the blue-green world of their ancestors. And now here they are – three hundred million kilometres from home. And it has all already gone horribly wrong.
This is the third of Tchaikovsky’s 'Dogs of War' series, following Dogs of War and Bear Head. It handily starts with a “Dramatis Personae” featuring a list of “characters”, “places and factions” and “terms”. The novel is split into five parts and 66 chapters, which makes it my kind of novel, no thirty page-long chapters here, phew. Tchaikovsky is an incredibly prolific writer, the author of some eight series and numerous stand-alone novels. If it weren’t for “A Dogs of War Book” written across the bottom of the cover, the title of this book and the nifty cover art by Pablo Hurtado de Mendoza depicting two bees having a tussle (one a “natural” bee and one an “enhanced” bee), the reader might think they have picked up a brand new book in Tchaikovsky’s 'Shadows of the Apt' series some eleven years after the last book – Seal of the Worm – appeared, but no, we are in Dogs of War territory, following on a few centuries after the events of the previous two books.
In my other reviews I often refer to that well-worn trope in horror novels – you don’t want to go there. I suppose in science fiction novels, there is that other trope – don’t answer the distress call, or signal, but Tchaikovsky gives it an original twist as this isn’t humanity encountering a malevolent alien species. This time, it is an almost alien species of bioforms with their origins on Earth going back to the mother world to encounter the remnants of humanity.
The story is driven by the viewpoint of nine major characters, including the visitors from Mars who are wide-eyed and full of good intentions but unprepared for the different factions and structures that have evolved on Earth ranging from a feudal group holed up in an old bunker, a Factory clinging to the old technology that prevailed before society collapsed, and a monastery worshipping the intelligence known as the Bees.
You can’t deny Tchaikovsky is a great world builder and comes up with some fantastic concepts, but the novel does suffer from the multiple viewpoints as we often get explanations and scenes being replayed by another character, and to be honest some of the characters are more alive and interesting than others. There is also a lot of info-dumping and harking back to the previous two books in the series which tends to put a brake on the proceedings from time to time, which is a shame as all of the books in the series are pretty much standalone titles drawing neatly to a close so I’m not sure all the info-dumping was really necessary.
Clearly, Earth isn’t a very nice place to live and conflict and distrust between the various factions is the norm, and into this troubled mix comes the Martians who are different physically and mentally from what is left of humanity, in fact, they don’t really see themselves as human anymore. Some of the mini-societies that the visitors encounter would rather hold on to what they have got and certainly don’t want the help of strangers who don’t even look human anymore. The team that has been sent to Earth consist of two humans called Tecomo and Ada; and two bioforms called Wells and Irae. Bioforms on Mars were originally created to serve humans, but now they have equal status Wells is a Dogform while Irae is a Dragonform and easily the most entertaining character in the novel, and as you can imagine having someone turn up who is a Dragonform doesn’t go down to well with the locals, and despite the grimness of life on Earth and the “rescue” mission going pear-shaped almost as soon as it starts, the book is full of humour and action, and sly observations and commentary.
The story comes to a satisfactory, if a bit rushed, ending, but there have been enough seeds planted to grow into another book in the series. Bee Speaker is a solid continuation of the series that readers of the previous two books will enjoy.
Ian Hunter
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