And here is my first review of the New Year.
For a while now Adrian has been blazing a trail and widening his repertoire since the days of the much-liked Shadows of the Apt fantasy series. Although he has been writing in many forms of the genre, it probably wasn’t until 2015 when his Clarke-awarding science fiction book, Children of Time, was published that he got really noticed. Since then, he has published a number of science fiction books to acclaim such as Children of Ruin (2019), (the sequel to Children of Time) and The Doors of Eden (2020).
Bear Head is set in the same universe as Dogs of War (2017), another of his successful SF books, although it is not a direct sequel. In this series animals have been bio-enhanced in intelligence to become Bioforms, that perform various jobs for humans. In Dogs of War uplifted animals such as bears, dogs and bees were given roles in the military, forming a mercenary attack squad for corporate industry. As unquestioning servants, they were extremely effective, although with sentience they eventually began to question their role and purpose.
Bear Head tells of Jimmy Marten, a bioengineered human, an engineer who has been adapted to cope with the challenges of building a colony on Mars named Hell City. As the name of the city suggests, life on Mars is tough, pleasures are few and Jimmy is addicted to Stringer, the local drug of choice. Desperate for money to pay for his next fix, he agrees to use some of his unused headspace to illegally carry data for Sugar, a local gangster.
However, to his great surprise Jimmy finds that his latest download begins to talk to him. We discover that his latest data claims to be a distinguished academic, author and civil rights activist, a bear named Honey.
Told initially by Jimmy in the first person, the story feels like a new version of Heinlein’s The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, with a setting of a real frontier town (think Outland (1981), for example, or Leigh Brackett’s Shambleau/Northwest Smith stories. I felt that there’s even a touch of Chip Delany’s frontier/outsider sf novels in these tough societies and Theodore Sturgeon’s Man Plus in the background of Jimmy’s journey to Mars.
Of course, unlike most of those, Jimmy is (at least as first) a rogue without many of the positive attributes that genre writers see in such a character. I wouldn’t say that he is particularly likeable, at least at first, going from one scam to the next and barely making a living. He is not as likeable as, for example, Han Solo, though as the novel progresses, we see some redeeming features.
The arrival of Honey (a bear character from Dogs of War) means that we get a glimpse of the bigger picture. Through backstory we discover how and why Honey has got to where she is now. On Earth a noisy activist group has led to the collaring of bio-enhanced animals, at the cost of their individual freedoms and rights. Led by Warner S Thompson, a sleazy yet media-savvy politician on Earth that reminded me of someone recently running the US – I’m sure that that is deliberate – whose core belief is to maintain control of the Bioforms through collaring and even aim to get rid of them, citing them as aberrations and a threat to ‘normal’ human beings. (Sound familiar?) He is linked with Honey in the past.
For those readers wanting to know what happened to the old characters from Dogs of War, we find what has happened to Bees, the World’s first Distributed Intelligence (DistInt). Infected with a virus in order to try and kill them, Bees was labelled a terrorist by The World Senate, the hoped-for peace-talks failed, and so Bees and the computer operating system intelligence known as HumOS had to go underground. All of this has an effect on the situation on Mars, Honey and therefore Jimmy.
When we eventually learn that Honey, through Jimmy, is the key to communicating with another presence on Mars, a tense situation becomes more so – the new entity is a novel intelligence, fragile, elusive, unknowable and potentially lethal. And Honey is here to make contact with it, whether Jimmy likes it or not.
As the book progresses, we see the consequences of this contact. Jimmy, as the articulate body through which Honey’s ideas are communicated, finds himself in a situation he didn’t expect and a bigger problem than he bargained for. Thompson has a much more sinister plan to keep his grip on politics for a long time which involves Honey, Jimmy and the Bioforms, and the last act of the novel is to thwart his plans. Although the main issue is resolved in the end, the finale leaves the reader with some intriguing ideas unanswered as well, which I suspect may be covered in a sequel.
As we are dealing with fairly traditional ideas here, a lot of this book is what I anticipated. There’s nasty politicians and big bad corporations backing them up, as well as the good guys. Generally it is pretty clear whose side we should be on through the book. Nevertheless, the rather expected initially reluctant buddy-buddy relationship between the hyperactive Jimmy and the stoic Honey is well done, with both developing mutual understanding by the end. I especially liked the point that, despite the poor treatment she has been given, Honey throughout is a force of calm who treats both Jimmy and the other Bioforms with respect, even as the worlds around them seem determined not to.
But what worked best for me is that the book takes themes that are very much in the zeitgeist of current genre tropes. What we really have here is a book about a disparate set of outsiders in the new frontier, who are striving for their own survival and the recognition of their own identity against a political force determined to do them harm. Through his characters and a science fiction plot, Tchaikovsky manages to deal with issues of identity and intelligence, freedom and control and even manages to do the tricky thing of making the uplifted animal intelligences more likeable than the human monsters we perhaps should identify with most.
This one draws you in, until by the end things are fast paced and effectively resolved. For all of its initial grimness, the book manages to end with the idea that there is hope for the future. For that reason I enjoyed this one a lot. In fact, dare I say it, Bear Head was a pleasingly bearable read. (Ha!)
Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Published by Head of Zeus January 2021
390 pages
ISBN: 978 1800 241 541
Review by Mark Yon
I adored Dogs of War and thought that Honey’s story was a very worthy sequel. I also found myself being pretty impressed by Tchaikovsky’s writing style as it seems like every sentence is just packed with ideas and information. I found the overall concept pretty scary.
Thanks, Rodney: pleased you liked it!