Brendan Davis's Reviews > The Doors of Eden

Every other Tchaikovsky fan seems to love this book so I guess I'm the voice of dissent. Very mild spoilers outside of spoiler tags.

The good thing first. The parallel earths were incredibly compelling. Every one was fascinating and felt organic. Each felt like there was a Children of Time hidden within the details, that we could have spent a whole book exploring the depths of divergent evolution and the stories only hinted at. I devoured the interludes, and the brief chapters we spent in the other worlds were fascinating.

Now the bad.

First of all, I didn't find any of the characters interesting, or care in the slightest what happened to them. None of them felt real. They felt like characters in bad Golden Age sci-fi who ostensibly exist with internal motivation and are supposed to be subtextually indicative of a worldview or point the author is trying to make but in reality are transparent plot devices whose feelings and motivations are inconsistent and entirely dependent on plot necessity. (view spoiler)[ At the climax the author attempts to obfuscate some of this by relying on the multiverse and the idea that there's SOME version of this character out there who would behave in this way, but at times the character acts so contrary to their nature it breaks credulity.

The best example of this is The Ice Queen Priestess. I just put the book down and can't remember half the characters names, but if you've read it you'll know who I mean. Her defining character trait is her religious devotion to The Ice Computer. She's its high priestess and her sole goal is communion with her god. So why in the world, at the climax of the book, would she destroy the entire multiverse, except for one reality, at the behest of Nazi Jeff Bezos? Her motivation made sense when she was helping NJB to ruthlessly allow the vast majority of the multiverse to be destroyed so a small portion could be saved. Her god would be saved. That's what matters. But at one point in the novel NJB decides to allow everything except for one single reality to be destroyed, and she continues to help him, even when his plan explicitly involves killing her god.

And Nazi Jeff Bezos is another example. In Children of Time all of the “evil characters” had understandable motivations. They had a goal, and were willing to do what it took. But NJB’s felt entirely dependent on what the author need from a bad guy. In the beginning he’s portrayed as ruthless in trying to achieve his ambitious and selfish aims. He has no loyalty or ideology outside of power, and is willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to do so. Later he talks about pursuing immortality with help from the rats, and it implies he wants this unchanging dystopian hellscape where he is eternally in charge. That makes sense. But then at the end of the book his ambition changes to saving England and transplanting it to some untouched Eden so he can plunder there? And he’s willing to sacrifice the vast majority of human technology, progress & luxuries to rule over the rubble and rule as a petty fascist? AND he’s willing to abandon his goal of immortality (since he abandoned all non humans and most of their research) to be a petty Oswald Moseley for a couple decades? This makes no sense. He was always willing to use those people, and certainly seemed to have some sympathy for them but he was using them like he used everyone else. The motivations are just so inconsistent, and seemed to change depending on what a super bad evil bad man would do at the moment. By the end he has as much depth as a Captain Planet villain. (hide spoiler)]

Then we have the enormous amount of padding in the book. A lot of it was like the worst of Lost. Weird things are happening. The reader, and viewpoint character, don’t know what’s going on and desperately want answers. There are people around them who have these answers, and the means, motive and opportunity to share that information. But since the mystery needs to be maintained for the reader and answers slowly dribbled out there are absurd contrivances or an inexplicable reluctance for the people with the answers to share them with the viewpoint character. Vague things are implied, but no concrete information when there is no motivating reason for the characters in the know not to share concrete information, and it would in fact make their lives a lot easier to do so. The number of times characters take a long journey somewhere, or rest for an extended period of time, and obstinately provide oblique explanations was frustrating. (view spoiler)[ An enormous part of this is attributed to The Cousins’ nature, with that level of explicit communication not being integral to their nature. But at many points its clearly something they’ll need to convey at some point (and do so later), and I’ll redirect you to my comments above about character motivations being inconsistent depending on the needs of the plot. (hide spoiler)]

Further padding is by the author’s weird fixation on having all six viewpoint characters be briefed on the exact same information in lengthy separate sections in ways that contribute nothing to the readers understanding of the information, or modify the characters motivation in any interesting or important way. It’s like the worst filler anime episodes, where 15 minutes of each episode are spent explaining the events of the last episode in a slightly different way that adds nothing.
As a fake example, the book would have a few pages on Character 1 finding out the sun is exploding. Typical reactions ensue.
“Oh no, the sun is exploding!”
“If the sun explodes the world I live on that revolves around the sun would not have a sun!”
“How do we stop the sun from exploding so the world I live on will have a sun?” Then a few pages later we switch to Character 2

“But if the sun explodes my garden won’t have sunshine!”
“My garden is very important to me so we need to stop the sun from exploding!” Then we switch to Character 3,

“What do you mean the sun is exploding?” etc. Almost all of the time it could be an aside that the character learned offscreen that the sun is exploding, and their reaction is exactly what you would expect.

Finally there’s the inane non-science. I’m not a scientist. Hell, I’m not even good at science. I know enough to make me think science fiction solutions sound reasonable even when they’re probably not. And I don’t expect strong science in science fiction. Science fiction, to me, is all about exploring about how big changes would affect the world that people live in. Small changes can lead to butterfly effects that might not occur to you but seem natural once you think about it. But this book is nothing but tautologies. One character is the multiverse’s greatest mathematician and she’s doing science and math fix problems. That’s not a summary, that’s the complete extent of the information we’re provided. When other characters talk to her she says things like “Well I used math to talk to the aliens.” “I’m trying to fix the problem of the sun exploding with math, but the math of science is very hard math.” I tried doing a search for “math” in my Kindle Web Reader so I could pull some direct quotes but it’s not enabled for searching yet. Might update this later. Most of the time it’s as bad as a character saying “The problem with space travel is you can’t go faster than light. But we did math on some light and found out with math we could mathematically go faster than light.” None of this is helped by the fact that literally every time the mathematician is in a scene they, or someone else, use the word “math” at least once. Usually in conjunction with “science.” I don’t know if that’s true earlier in the book, but I got the suspicion late into the novel and it held true. It’s especially baffling since the author clearly knows more about science than I do. The sections on the parallel earths had science I didn’t know before, and I felt like I learned some things. It’s just that there are vast sections that are just “doing the science!”

If you stuck with me until now, thanks. This book really bugged me because I know the author is capable of so much more. And there were some good ideas in here, just horribly executed. In a lot of ways it felt like a first book crammed with too many ideas, no focus, and no authorial voice.