Dragonfly Falling

Dragonfly Falling is the second book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt sequence, published in 2009 and following directly on from Empire in Black and Gold. The premise of the whole series, just to get this out of the way early, is insect people. Tchaikovsky has built a secondary world in which the human population is divided into Kinden, each one psychically and physically bound to a particular insect: Beetles are stocky industrialists, Wasps are militarist imperialists, Mantises are duelling honour-fanatics, Ants share a hive mind across an entire city, and so on down a taxonomy that gets steadily more inventive the further you read. It sounds, written down like that, faintly preposterous. It is not. Tchaikovsky was a zoologist before he was a novelist and it shows on every page, in the sense that he is not just borrowing the costume of insect life but the underlying logic of it, and once you have settled into the conceit the world starts feeling more rigorously thought-through than most epic fantasy settings managed in the previous decade.

The first book did the work of setting up the threat. The Wasp Empire, an expansionist slaver state with a taste for sustained atrocity, is moving west into the Lowlands, and only Stenwold Maker, a middle-aged Beetle artificer and intelligence operative, has both noticed and been willing to do anything about it. Dragonfly Falling is what happens once the warnings stop being warnings. The Wasp armies are on the march, and the book picks up with the war beginning in earnest.

The plot moves on three main fronts. Totho and Salma, two of the younger characters from the first book, arrive at the Ant-kinden city of Tark to scout the approaching Wasp army and are promptly arrested by the very people they have come to help, who quite reasonably assume they are spies for the other side. By the time the Tarkesh work out their mistake and let them out, the city is already under siege, and the question of escape has been answered for them. Meanwhile, in Collegium, Stenwold is still trying to make the city magnates take the war seriously, which has the energy of every committee meeting you have ever sat through, except that the consequence of being ignored this time is the destruction of the city. The Wasps oblige by sending a disgraced Major Thalric, a recurring presence from the first book and one of Tchaikovsky's better creations, with orders to kill Stenwold and burn Collegium to the ground. And in the imperial capital, the young Emperor Alvdan is being courted by a slave called Uctebri, a Mosquito-kinden of disquieting age and patience, who happens to mention that he knows magic capable of granting eternal life. The reader, having spent any time at all with stories of this shape, will work out roughly how that conversation is going to develop. It develops worse.

What makes the book do its work as a middle volume, where middle volumes traditionally tread water, is that Tchaikovsky uses the extra room to widen the world rather than slow it down. The siege at Tark gives him space to actually show how the Ant-kinden fight, which turns out to mean a kind of methodical, telepathically coordinated killing that wrings the maximum cost out of every Wasp soldier who walks at the walls. The Wasps, in turn, lean on the weight of numbers, slave troops thrown forward as ablative armour, and the new artificing of an unsettling half-breed master engineer named Drephos, whose introduction is one of the book's quieter pleasures: a brilliant, broken, oddly genteel monster who treats warfare as a craft problem and Totho as a promising apprentice. The Moth-kinden, glimpsed earlier, get fuller play here as the world's surviving magicians, mountain-dwelling and ancient and faintly disdainful of everybody beneath them. And the new Kinden introduced this time, the Woodlice and the Mosquitoes, do exactly the work you would hope for from a writer with a biology degree, which is to say they extend the system in directions that feel like discoveries rather than inventions.

The pace is the other thing the book gets right. Empire in Black and Gold had the slow-burn problem of setup, a lot of characters being moved into the rooms they would eventually have to fight their way out of. Dragonfly Falling has no such constraint. Two cities are under siege for substantial stretches of the book, a third faces an imperial assassin from the inside, the Emperor is quietly drifting into a kind of necromantic faustian bargain, and the action genuinely does not stop. It is the kind of fantasy novel where you can be three hundred pages in and realise you have not had a quiet chapter since the prologue, and that the book has somehow trained you not to need one.

The trick of the series, and it becomes clearer here than it was in book one, is that Tchaikovsky is using the insect premise to get at something quite specific about what fantasy normally smooths over. Different people in this world genuinely fight, think, and live differently from one another, and a war between them is not just a war of arms but a war of incompatible cognitive architectures. The Wasps cannot really comprehend the Ant hive-mind. The Moths' magic does not survive contact with Beetle engineering. The Spider-kinden's labyrinthine politics make no sense to anyone except other Spiders, who use them to murder one another with great courtesy. Once you notice this, a lot of the plotting suddenly looks less like genre furniture and more like the working-out of a thesis: what if the impasse of an empire is not military but anthropological?

By the close of Dragonfly Falling, the lines are drawn. The Wasps have made their move, the Lowlands have begun, belatedly, to push back, and the stage is set for Blood of the Mantis. As a second volume, this is the rare thing that is actually better than the first, which is about the best signal a new fantasy series can send. On this evidence, Tchaikovsky is a writer worth committing to, and the next book cannot come soon enough.