Cage of Souls

Written by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Narrated by David Thorpe

The sun is bloated, diseased, dying perhaps. Beneath its baneful light, Shadrapar, last of all cities, harbours fewer than 100,000 human souls. Built on the ruins of countless civilisations, Shadrapar is a museum, a midden, an asylum, a prison on a world that is ever more alien to humanity.

Bearing witness to the desperate struggle for existence between life old and new is Stefan Advani: rebel, outlaw, prisoner, survivor. This is his testament, an account of the journey that took him into the blazing desolation of the western deserts; that transported him east down the river
and imprisoned him in the verdant hell of the jungle’s darkest heart; that led him deep into the labyrinths and caverns of the underworld. He will meet with monsters, madmen, mutants.

The question is, which one of them will inherit this Earth?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781705096796

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, has practised law and now writes full time. He's also studied stage-fighting, perpetrated amateur dramatics and has a keen interest in entomology and table-top games. Adrian is the author of the critically acclaimed Shadows of the Apt series, the Echoes of the Fall series and other novels, novellas and short stories. Children of Time won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Children of Ruin and Shards of Earth both won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel. The Tiger and the Wolf won the British Fantasy Award for Best Fantasy Novel, while And Put Away Childish Things won the BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction.

Reviews for Cage of Souls

[normalmostly · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book really takes a long time (not a bad time) figuring out what it is and where it's going, and even then it never seems that convinced of itself.

Normally this would ruin a book, and maybe it does ruin this one too, but only enough to take it from being an incredibly amazing, wonderful book into just an amazingly incredible book of wonder.

Still not sure entirely what it is that I just read, but giving whatever it is less than 5 stars feels wrong. Aptly titled book, I suppose.

Annihilation, Hyperion, and King Rat (Clavell) all in one

[craiggoodwin-154015 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Really 4.5.Excellent yarn, bursting with ideas and interesting characters. Audio book narrator is first rate.

[tuusannuuska-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

How to review this book. This is fantasy set in the distant future, that reads like fantasy set in the pre-industrial times. Sure, there are some industries left, but only the things humans deem interesting enough (like the cosmetics industry) but everything else has fallen behind and been forgotten.

I really, really love the concept of fallen societies. I loved it here too, and I enjoyed Tchaikovsky's imagination and the commentary on some pretty harrowingly contemporary themes. On the surface, I should have loved this one, but turns out, I only liked this.

If I have to pin point the one thing that made this a good read instead of a great one (for me), it would have to be the story telling. The language feels "old", as befits the culture and the story teller in question (who is an academic, and one of the minority who is still literate). This just isn't something I like to read, even in an otherwise great book.

I'm glad I read this though, as it's a bit different from what I usually read, and it's not like a four star is in anyway a bad book. I've just come to expect 5 stars from Tchaikovsky, based on his sci-fi.

[schant-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Like wading through treacle. No storyline of characterization, just pointless violent episodes, plodding gothic meandering, and pantomime deformities and monsters. I'm so done with this author!

[iansales_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I’ve now read half of this year’s Clarke Award shortlist. And… oh dear. One nominee is a space opera du jour, also nominated for the Hugo and Nebula (which it did not win), and spends more time on world-building and its protagonist’s love life than it does on plot or ideas. Another is a near-future B-movie, poorly-written hackwork filled with recycled tropes. And now, Cage of Souls… Tchaikovsky is scarily prolific, banging out novels in a range of genres and subgenres with inhuman rapidity. He previously won the Clarke in 2016 for Children of Time, and the BSFA Award this year for its sequel, Children of Ruin. I’ve read the first, but not the second. His other books have been fantasy or steampunk. Cage of Souls is, at least, quite well-written – certainly above average for the genre, but not really stand-out prose – but unfortunately it also reads like a novel Robert Silverberg could have written in the 1970s. It is bizarrely old-fashioned. It is set during the final days of Earth, when only a single city, Shadrapar, remains. So who the stranger in the line, “How can I describe to you, a stranger who will never know it, the place of my birth?”, is something of a mystery. The characters have mostly contemporary names, and are pretty much exclusively European. There are very few women in the cast, and they’re chiefly defined by their attractiveness. The words “man” and “mankind” are used to refer to humanity. And the plot assumes that after hundreds of thousands of years of civilisation, humanity will have regressed to something like late nineteenth-century USA, or, er, early twenty-first century USA. The narrator is sent to the Island, a prison located in the middle of distant swamp, where the inmates are treated worse than slaves, and could be killed by the guards for no reason – the Marshal even murders one of each new intake of prisoners simply to prove that he’s a hard bastard. I honestly thought we’d got this sort of nonsense out of our system. Yes, there’s all those self-published mil sf and space operas, but who takes them seriously? Except recently there have been announcements about new space operas by established writers, and it’s the same tired old genocide in space shit. Is it the times? The US and UK are currently led by half-witted corrupt incompetents who make Nero look “strong and stable”, and both have dismally failed to contain the pandemic, with catastrophic consequences… So the genre starts churning out mindless genocidal crap as some sort of antidote? Seriously? Sf is, I admit, a US mode of fiction, but we are under no obligation to accept uncritically its specifically American tenets. Having said that, it wasn’t until two thirds into this novel I realised Tchaikovsky was riffing off Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, and while I have to applaud the ambition – and my feelings toward Wolfe’s fiction are conflicted – the comparison does Cage of Souls few favours. I looked at the full submissions list for the Clarke Award and it took me no more than five minutes to find a dozen books more interesting than those on the actual shortlist. I’ve not read much Tchaikovsky but I’d consider him a safe pair of hands – and he did win the BSFA Award this year – but I have to wonder why Cage of Souls was picked for the shortlist because it doesn’t feel at all like twenty-first century science fiction.