Member-only story
What happens at the end of the end of the world?
Review: Adrian Tchaikovsky — Cage of Souls
Two men on a boat play chess.
One wears a uniform, the other drab prison greys.
There is one grimy porthole for a window, and the table is bolted to the floor. One of the men is a dashing duellist, and the other is an academic. Probably not the one you’re thinking of.
They are playing an ancient game as they travel down a harsh river through an unforgiving, ever-evolving jungle blooming with life that would terrify the worst nightmares to crawl out of a Tolkien bestiary. Somewhere beyond the trees, the sun is sick and red.
This is the apocalypse as imagined by Adrian Tchaikovsky, in Cage of Souls. It is an unlikely way to tell post-apocalyptic fiction, a memoir-cum-travelogue in the manner of a seventeenth century noble fallen on hard times and forced into adventure largely by his own incompetence.
Yet it works. It’s a break from the genre often dominated by coming-of-age tales, Young Adult dramas where a new, corrupt order has to be challenged and brought down by the new generation. In most post-apocalyptic fiction there is a sense that, while humans have made a very big mess of their own civilisation, the bedrock of the world remains stable. Not so this one.
