The Immanent Frame: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt
Worlds furnished with Chekov’s arsenal
Last week I finished the tenth volume of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s series, Shadows of the Apt. It’s all I can do not to immediately reach for whatever work of his I haven’t read yet. For the last year and a half, I’ve gorged on his novels. I binged Children of Time and Children of Ruin. I listened to most of the Final Architecture trilogy while in the gym or doing dishes. I received The City of Last Chances as a Christmas gift. More recently, I started Shadows of the Apt as a way to stay awake while holding my infant daughter through the night.
But then I couldn’t stop. I read him on planes and over family vacations. On any given day of the last six months, I may have appeared to be doing the work of a humanities professor, but was secretly obsessed with a group of people called “Mantis-Kinden.” In most hands, phrases like “Mantis Kinden” would signal “hack writer.” In Tchaikovsky’s, they come alive in a fragile, fierce, and Celtic beauty. I recently wrote Tchaikovsky a gushing email via his website, to which the master himself responded with a very kind, single-sentence note of thanks.
I don’t know how he does it. For most of my reading life, I have taken it as a self-evident that any author who writes at least one, if not two, long speculative fiction novels a year is likely a poor craftsman. Tchaikovsky has shattered this axiom. He writes engaging, exceptionally well-plotted science fiction and fantasy at impossible speeds. His characters live and breathe and have their being in worlds furnished with Chekov’s arsenal. Tchaikovsky understands plots: his timing is impeccable and satisfying. No matter how delightfully fantastic the setting, the characters’ humanity remains and touches our own. His familiarity with literature, theology, politics, history, zoology, law, and science is always evident but never on preening display.
Tchaikovsky likewise possesses that peculiarly English ability to blend genre, inventiveness, sentiment, humor, melodrama, understatement, adventure, and pathos. Only with Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville have I found myself so transported by contemporary speculative fiction; but unlike VanderMeer, he can offer explanations that don’t cheapen his mythos. Unlike Miéville, Tchaikovsky has fewer political axes to grind.
Indeed, Shadows of the Apt is a qualified defense of liberalism when it isn’t everything else. At its heart lies the city of Collegium, reminiscent of Oxford, Cambridge, or Durham, with a hint of London. For all its flaws, Collegium prides itself on its acceptance of other races as well as its representative polity. Its people are the “Beattle-Kinden,” a race of humans whose stocky forms and capacity to endure are their “Art” – a set of race (or Kindend)-specific traits derived from their ancient affiliation with a kind of Platonic form of “beetle-ness.” Such associations with insects characterize all the races in the series, issuing in various forms of ability, revulsion, desire, wit, and fear.
The Beetles of Collegium, however, are insistent on something closer to a meritocracy, and nearly all Kinden are welcome to study at the college. The Beatles are also “Apt,” which means they have foregone the magic of the “bad old days” that still characterizes the superstitious and “Inapt” Moth, Dragonfly, Spider, and Mantis Kinden. Apt people are capable of technological innovation. They have come to embrace a scientific and purely natural and materialist understanding of the world. An Apt Beetle, for instance, can come to understand and use a crossbow. An Inapt Spider-Kinden would find it impossible to learn or operate such a machine, however proficient she might be with a rapier or bow.
Ranged against the Beetles and their allies are the fiercely martial Wasp-Kinden. The Wasps are also Apt and reminiscent of the Third Reich and the Roman Imperium in their power, organization, and cruelty. Convinced of their superiority and right to rule, they wage unceasing war by order of their mad emperors, whose secret police maintain unstinting devotion.
Central to the story is the resolve of Stenwold Maker, one of the Dons or Masters of the College, to oppose the Wasp threat to the entire world. Together, Maker, his proteges, friends, and allies struggle against the Wasps and, at times, their own consciences to defend a notion of civil goodness in which they fervently believe yet still struggle to define. Maker, his allies, and his enemies come alive across the series. I found myself missing their company almost as soon as I’d finished.
Characters like these provide an antidote to the boorish Realpolitik of George Martin and his disciples. Here are real people, flawed and – dare I say it – sinful; yet they remain capable of true sacrifice for one another and for their ideals. If you have given up on finding writers who create complex characters living in complex times yet still attempting to live by an ethics external to their desires, do not despair. Tchaikovsky knows where his stories are going, and he knows how to retain their humanity on the way. For all its bluster, fantasy à la Martin never managed to plot a good story, nor did it bother to understand people.
As the books progress, the revival of magic takes center stage. Here again, Tchaikovsky’s introduction of metaphysics raises better questions than the Martin-esque assumption that power structures alone determine reality. In our world, Charles Taylor has described the essentially materialist anti-supernatural stance toward reality as the “Immanent Frame.” In Tchaikovsky, the Immanent Frame begins to crack and then to shatter even as technological innovation reaches new heights. We are invited to ask: what does a liberalism predicated on materialism mean in the face of metaphysics? Likewise, can the technology born from and supportive of the Immanent Frame co-exist alongside spiritual powers? Are spiritual powers even anything more than our own projections? While Tchaikovsky could have certainly explored these questions in greater detail, he does allow for them. He is also remarkable here for his ability to detail how technology changes civilizations and battlefields while also telling a story about the return of magic to a world whose central powers have forgotten it.
Such reflections exist mostly at the edges of these books. But that’s alright, because more than anything, Shadows of the Apt is fun. To the incorrigible escapist who still has some standards, who enjoys good writing about resistance, heroism, conspiracy, pitched battle, romance, friendship, travel, sacrifice, subterfuge, suspense, wit, tragedy, triumph, resilience, and awe – this series is for you.
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