Lucas Stoffel

Children of Time Book Review: Adrian Tchaikovsky wrote a novel about the evolution of intelligent spiders, and he made me root for them harder than I root for most human characters in fiction. That sentence sounds absurd. The book earns it completely.

Children of Ruin Book Review: Adrian Tchaikovsky looked at his Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel about uplifted spiders and thought, "You know what this universe needs? Intelligent octopuses." He was right. He was also determined to make readers deeply uncomfortable, and he was right about that too.

Children of Memory Book Review: Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series has been doing something quietly remarkable: using hard science fiction to ask genuinely philosophical questions about consciousness, identity, and what it means to be a thinking being — and then making you care about the answers on an emotional level. Children of Memory, the third entry, continues that tradition while pushing into territory that's stranger and more unsettling than anything in the pr

Leviathan Wakes launches The Expanse with space opera, noir detective fiction, and alien body horror. The best space opera of the century. Five stars. Book Review.

Speaker for the Dead: it's not a sequel to Ender's Game. Not really. It shares a protagonist and a timeline, but it's a completely different kind of book. Ender's Game is a military science fiction novel about a child prodigy fighting an alien war. Speaker for the Dead is a slow, philosophical novel about a middle-aged man trying to understand an alien species by telling the truth about the dead. The fact that the same author wrote both of these is genuinely remarkable.