City of Last Chances (The Tyrant Philosophers)

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The Anchorwood is a grove of trees at the heart of the Ilmar that pre-dates the city itself. This grove of trees is, at the right time, a magical door to a distant (and still relatively unknown) land that can only be reached with the help of protective magical artefacts and a native guide from the mysterious world on other side. Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Tchaikovsky (Children of Time) makes the end of the world a personal affair in this humorous, sharp-edged novel. The unnamed narrator is the last temporal Continue reading »

Oppression. Political intrigue. Colonization. Religion. Poverty. Bigotry. Magic. Demons. Worker's rights. Crime. Revolution. Wrongful incarceration. These are all a part of this story by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky (Children of Ruin) examines alternate dimensions and speculative evolution in this tropey, entertaining sci-fi adventure that’s both outrageously bizarre and utterly convincing. Continue reading » The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Most of the city's resistance factions are willing to get their hands as dirty as the Pals' are to free their city and make sure that they get to be on top instead of the other resistance groups when the city is free. This attitude is best exemplified by the murdering, terroristic Shrikes and the brutal, criminal Vultures.

Editors

But don’t expect your usual heroes and heroics. Those don’t pay off. It’s a place for those who work for self-interest, and all we can hope is that at some point it may align with what may be the lesser of evils. And don’t expect hand-holding and exposition - you are in the middle of it all, and Tchaikovsky expects you to figure it all out, and with a bit of an effort you certainly can, and enjoy it, too. This cool concept falls a bit short for two reasons- one is the simple fact of too many things going on that are not fully explored/developed and the second is that one book can't adequately do justice to such a complex story. The world Tchaikovsky presents is absolutely fascinating. Despite its tight focus geographically, because the characters come from different regions, cultures, and even worlds/dimensions, the novel offers up a rich stew of highly original elements: different types of magic, belief systems, governing systems, along with other basic magical tropes such as portals and curses, etc. We get tantalizing glimpses of all these without a lot of info dumps or an unnecessary amount of detail, and while I don’t mind exhaustive world-building, there’s something to be said for this method as well, which offers up a bit of mystery to nicely complement the fantastical. Tchaikovsky's prose is a thing of beauty. It's dense but managed to transport me in the setting. The action scenes, the magical horror scenes and the richness of the inhabitants of this world left me many times in awe. He's clearly an author with a very rich imagination and very talented with words.

That being said, those external forces are something of a marmite aspect to the book. By the time I reached the end, I loved the role they had to play in the story, but they wouldn't be to everyone's taste, not least because they leave so much unknown and unresolved. They are a chaotic spectre hovering on the edge of reason and of the city, and to understand them would be to strip them of their magic, their mystique. But that absence of understanding is also an absence of resolution, and that isn't always everyone's cup of tea - especially when it feels, as this does, not like there areanswers but we just don't have them yet, but rather that there may be no answers at all. Some magic is beyond our knowledge, in this book and this world, and we must simply accept that. In many ways, the wood on the edge of the city and what lies beyond it, a portal to other worlds that is discussed by the characters in hushed whispers, with its strange guardians who operate on rules no one else understands, are an element of folklore, not of magic, in the way they act upon the story. Magic might have rules and explanations - folklore is deeper, older and more oblique. The Herons, river smugglers who bring weapons into the city from the surrounding country, and who get refugees out.

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We witness happenings that relate to the criminal underworld, academia, workers and demons, refugees and outsiders, forgotten gods, and magical artefacts from a wide range of perspectives. Ilmar is the novel's main character though, and this includes distinct and atmospheric areas such as The Reproach, The Hammer Districts, and The Anchorage. I found The Reproach to be a haunting and intensely interesting part of the city and I adored my time reading about that area and its inhabitants most of all. This is an epic drimdark fantasy from Adrian Tchaikovsky, currently a standalone. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for March 2023 at SFF Hot from Printers: New Releases group. The book is already on the longlist of BSFA and possibly will be nominated for other awards in 2023. Arthur C. Clarke Award–winner Tchaikovsky (Children of Ruin) transports readers to a bleak dystopia in this powerful story of class conflict and climate crisis. In the not too distant Continue reading » Approximately every 8-10 chapters, there is a Mosaic chapter, which I would describe as a city-eyed view of happenings: summarising what is taking place throughout many areas of the city at the given time. As City of Last Chances progresses, we’re updated regarding the potential revolution that is stirring underneath the surface: who will light the fuse, will the Palleseen military be prepared, what will the consequences be and what part will the supernatural elements of the city play?

Indeed, while the world may be richly unique in its aspect, there’s also a joyous familiarity in the smartly exercised plot devices. There’s a Macguffin, a collection of unlikely heroes and a totalitarian state. All of which set the scene for a good solid dose of SFF. Picture a city under occupation and on the verge of revolution. Imagine the streets teeming with discontent and bubbling with anger. Delve into each shadowed alcove and underground lair to discern who will light the first match and set fire to the masses, urging them to overrule the Palleseen regime.

Not that there wasn’t a part of him that wouldn’t have shaken that demon’s taloned hand like a brother, but that would have been a step too far. And so he watched the beast being enslaved to them ills again and knew that even as he fought every day for a better life for his people, he was a collaborator in a larger war. And he hated it. Fundamentally, that's what it is. An account of a stunningly wide variety of people's experiences in a city under occupation. And the differences of that experience... how one fact of existence can shatter and refract and become a hundred different perspectives on the same set of events, a thousand different responses. I’m rating City of Last Chances 6/10 as it features moments of Tchaikovsky‘s brilliance but was hard work in places too. That being said, it was a unique reading experience that I would recommend mostly because I’d be interested to see what other people think of this intriguing book. I’d especially recommend City of Last Chances to readers who enjoyed the sweeping scale, industry, revolution and political turmoil of Joe Abercrombie’s Age of Madness.

As you can see from that only partial list, we’re working with a lot of characters here. And rarely are more than two or three together at a time, which means a number of sub-plots peppering the over-arching dual narrative of the search for the stolen item and the possible rebellion against the Palleseen. This book reads like a collection of interconnected short stories. Each chapter, we are jumping POV to a different denizen of the city with fingers in different pies. As the book continues, the stories become more interconnected and we get repeats of the same characters. Thanks to NetGalley and Head of Zeus for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. Tchaikovsky explores themes of oppression and revolution through characters at various levels of social hierarchy on multiple sides of the conflict. The impulsive passion and heart of youth in their idealized yet privileged shouts for freedom they have only a vague notion of, the cynical resignation of older figures who only talk of uprising but make do with unfair compromise, self-styled rebels who try to profit from the fighting. Caught up in all this are the people at the bottom of the pyramid who suffer either way, factory workers and demon slaves. There is even a perspective from a lowly demon from the Underworld, among my favourite chapters.Carelia and Evene; the duo known as the Bitter Sisters. They lead one of the largest criminal organisations in Ilmar; the Vultures. Every scene they were in was full of menace and tension.