(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
If you read a lot of really good science fiction, it will become immediately apparent that imagination is rarely in short supply among the boundlessly creative authors of the genre.
But what will also emerge is how imaginatively fertile some of the giants of the genre are with one of the leading members of this illustrious pack being British writer Adrian Tchaikovsky who manages that rare and dazzling feat of being prodigious in output while delivering consistently high quality, must-readable stories.
His Expert System book duology, which began with The Expert System’s Brother is a shining example of his audaciously clever Tchaikovsky and how he crafts stories which are both impressively imaginative but which resonate with real, raw humanity, the kind that reminds you of our tenacity and inventiveness as a species and how there’s very little we won’t do to satisfy that evolutionary need for survival.
The second book in the series, The Expert System’s Champion, continues the story of Handry, a young man who exiled from his village by a wholly unfair quirk of fate which sees him struggling to survive in a world which is clearly not Earth but which houses a great many medieval-esque humans, and which appears determined to make life as difficult as possible for those who call it home.
One thing that is certain is that those in the villages are given the gift of the wisdom of “the ancients”, with selected people housing “ghosts” who provide guidance on medicine, agriculture and a range of other things.
The hill, the shielding boulder they’d built against, it was moving. Weed and mud as its base bulged and split as it levered itself up. He saw the vast limbs there, like the hand of a half-formed god.
Quite what the ancients are must be reading to the reading of this utterly absorbing novella, but suffice to say the world-building and thinking behind what is really going on this world is brilliantly, awe-inspiringly clever.
Alas the truth of things has been lost to most of the people, and while they see Handry and his band of legendary misfits as outcasts so fearful they are sage stories of warning to disobedient children, the truth is those they shun are actually the ones who see the truth of things.
Superstition is a strange and mindless thing, but also a cruelly effective one, consigning Handry and the outsiders to whom he offers a home and a purpose to the very margins of society, their only usefulness it seems being to fight the various endemic monsters of the planet which often defy and exhaust the ability of the villagers to do so.
It’s a precarious existence in many ways but one that at least means Handry and his family have some reason for being and are not simply objects of scary myth and legend to be shunned wherever possible.
But as The Expert System’s Champion opens, it emerges that there is a greater threat at work on a planet not exactly short of them, and that this time around the ancients don’t have any ready answers and that it might come down to the misfits and the outcasts to save the day even though they find themselves in over their heads too.
(courtesy official author site)
But at least they have the openness of mind to at least think outside the box to find a way to battle this menace which is far more than can be said for the vast majority of villagers who are more than happy to stay well inside their well-defined, tradition-bound boxes.
It’s this divergence of outlook and thus, approaches, that really fills the heart of the narrative of The Expert System’s Champion which is daringly clever and fantastically imaginative but which at its core is about what makes us human and how that can both help us progress and hinder our efforts.
What is really impressive about the novella is that even when there are some dark horror-lite elements introduced – the horror depends very much on your appetite for the lengths people will go to ensure survival and if the result if that hard reaching means the resulting beings are even human anymore; if you lose the innate humanity, what’s actually been saved? – The Expert System’s Champion never wavers from asking some really insightful and thoughtful questions.
Tchaikovsky has always had this as a strength in his writing, happy to go to some truly astonishing, jaw-dropping places in the pursuit of a compellingly good story but never at the expense of intimate and affectingly meaningful explorations of what it means to be us.
I knew it wouldn’t be long before the stone-things re-grouped and came to exact their vengeance.
This commitment to keep humanity at the heart of every story, no matter how fantastical anchors novellas like The Expert System’s Champion in the kind of groundedness that stop them getting lost in any blockbuster-level narratives.
It means that even as you marvel at the visceral world-building, so palpable that you feel like you could reach out and touch it – every novelist aspires for this type of locational evocation but Tchaikovsky gets there each and every time – and wonder at the smart ways he ties a multiplicity of threads together into a coherently intense but accessible storyline, that you feel each and every heartbeat of every single character.
They may be centuries or millennia removed from us and living lives that differ from ours in fairly significant ways but their cares and concerns, their triumphs and their failures, and their desperate fight for survival all ring true and make sense.
That’s what good sci-fi should be and what The Expert System’s Champion most assuredly is, big picture storytelling that comes with some truly intimate emotional explorations that will resonate with anyone who has had to get somewhere impossible and has actually made it.
With characters that will grab your attention and your heart, soaring clever dialogue that comes alive and a narrative that goes big but never at the expense of smaller, meaningful moments, The Expert System’s Champion is a fitting and enthralling conclusion to a duology borne of the imagination of a master storyteller who knows the audacious richness of imagination but also how much more powerful it becomes when it is centred on the very essence, live and vitality of what it means to be human.