It oughta be a movie: The Doors of Eden, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
After reading this and the ‘Children of Time’/‘Children of Ruin’ books, I’ve concluded my favorite thing about Adrian Tchaikovsky’s writing are A) the fantastic use of biology, particularly evolutionary ideas, and B) his ability to create characters, human or otherwise, that are immediately endearing, in part because of their flaws. However, while the other two books had a somewhat more leisurely pace, this one’s action-packed mystery/spy-thriller structure combined with parallel worlds shenanigans kept me on the edge of my seat throughout. That, and the fact that main characters in this one are all human, make me think this one could make a very engaging movie adaptation without losing too much1.
1. The depiction of the internal lives of spiders and octopuses and how they are similar to and different from ours were something I loved about the other two books…but that would be super difficult to translate to the screen!
The story begins with Elsinore Mallory (“Mal”) and Lisa Chandrapraiar (“Lee”), a pair of school friends turned girlfriends who are devoted cryptid hunters. But when they go in search of the “Birdman of Bodmin Moor” they accidentally pass through a portal into a snowy landscape. Lee escapes, but Mal is lost, for four years. Then, unexpectedly, Lee gets a call from her. Mal doesn’t show, but Lee, alarmed by sirens and thinking she might be hurt, stumbles into a crime scene. The flashing lights are surrounding the apartment of Dr. Kay Amal Khan, a trans woman scientist/mathematician. The cavalry had been called by MI6 employees Julian Sabreur (who clearly wants to be James Bond but also very clearly isn’t) and Alison Matchell (whose skill as an analyst stems partly from her own genuine paranoia). They had been keeping tabs on the outspoken doctor, considered quite a valuable asset by the government, and noticed chatter from a white supremacist gang about paying her a visit. But by the time they arrived, someone or something else had beaten the thugs to a bloody pulp – and it clearly wasn’t Dr. Khan, who very sensibly locked herself in the bathroom with a kitchen knife! Camera footage shows no one going in, but catch coming out a freakishly solid-looking man and a woman who might just be Mal…
Not too far into the story, especially with the “Excerpts from ‘Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence’” I started wondering if Tchaikovsky was drawing on Dr. Stephen Jay Gould’s idea that if you “rewound the tape of life” and started it again, you’d likely get very different outcomes. Yep: Gould and his book ‘Wonderful Life’ are listed in the acknowledgements! I very much enjoyed that. And, as usual, Tchaikovsky makes the different societies that develop from those various ancestral species distinct and believable. Again, I won’t say much more about this, but that idea is the crux of this whole story and of the threat that looms over all versions of earth.
It should be noted that this is a book that wears its politics on its sleeve. I’m probably biased, since I agree on basically all points and therefore really enjoyed that aspect as well. But I think that, even if you didn’t, you could probably still read the book and appreciate it, since it generally makes a case for those views rather than just assuming that everyone would automatically agree. For example, in one of the possible earths the civilization that develops is obsessed with “purity” - but if you restrict your gene pool to such an extreme, that leaves your society an easier target for pandemic disease! I particularly enjoyed getting the thoughts of the antagonist’s2 hired goon. He’s a guy who is good at violence, and who is used to suppressing his own conscience for his paycheck - but it is still there, even if in an atrophied form. Still, if you by any chance agree with the character who would rather risk the destruction of the world than let the “bugs and monkeys and vermin and queers” coexist with him…you probably won’t like this! But maybe you should read it anyway.
2. It feels weird to call him “the villain” since, ultimately, he isn’t creating the threat, he’s just making it harder for the rest of the main cast to fix it by trying to pull off his own self-serving plan simultaneously.
Adaptation issues:
This is a 600 page book, so obviously the biggest challenge in adapting it would be fitting it into a 2-hour movie. However, there is a lot of description that could be skipped, given the visual medium. You’d also probably have to cut any timelines – interesting though they might be in book format - that don’t interact with the main plot. The timelines you’d have to keep are, in rough order of screen-time needed to show/explain their worlds:
- The rat-weasels
- The “bird-men”
- The Cambrians
- The Ediacaran world
- The Cousins
- Maybe a bit of the fish people (but the explanation given of them by one of the characters might be sufficient)
The first two would require them most special effects; I’d go with some kind of puppet plus a bit of CGI. The Cambrians and Ediacaran would be more like set design (that makes sense in context, I promise!), while the Cousins might just require some prosthetics and padding.
The dialogue is already pretty good, and any important thoughts that would be weird for the characters to speak out loud can likely be conveyed with facial expressions. We’ve already got some diversity to the human cast with three LGBT+ characters and two South Asian ones (plus a bit of unnamed but evident neurodiversity), but if you wanted to add a bit extra Alison would be the main character whose ethnicity could be most easily swapped3. There are other more minor characters, of course, but since they’d be on-screen for 5 minutes, tops, they don’t do much for representation one way or another!
3. For example, I feel like making Lucas any variety of non-white would change the way his closet-fascist of a boss treats him! You could still do it, it would just require examining whether and in what way that altered relationship would change his decisions.
Overall recommendation: If you like science fiction that is funny, socially-conscious, and ultimately optimistic; or if you are just a huge biology nerd; and especially if (like me) you are both…absolutely go read this and Tchaikovsky’s other works!
