Do you know what is not a wise decision? Picking up an enormous ten-book series when you are a reviewer trying to get out weekly content. But as everyone, absolutely everyone, says: wisdom is for fools. So today, I am here to talk about Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt, the first and largest series he has written all about fantasy cultures tied to insects. We are big Tchaikovsky fans here at The Quill to Live, and it felt like a shame that none of us had read this seminal work. The ten books are roughly divided into three phases, which I will get into, and have many hallmarks of being Tchaikovsky’s first major writing project. Yet, despite some hiccups common to epics of this size, I do definitely think this series is worth a read and exists as the foundation upon which many of Tchaikovsky’s later stories are built.
First off, what is Shadows of the Apt? In the simplest terms, it is a war story reminiscent of both world wars told through the lens of a land of bug kinden—humans that share magical connections to different species of insect and take on elements of their physiology. The kinden have magical powers based on the type of bug they are tied to: flies can fly, mantis have incredible proficiency with weapons, beetles have incredible endurance, and wasps can throw magical stings that melt people’s faces. Tchaikovsky builds a Tolkien-esque land of these magical peoples and cultures and introduces a hostile empire of expansionist conquerors who are dead set on leveling the planet: namely, the wasps. Book one, Empire in Black and Gold, thrusts us into the mind of one of the most central characters in the series, Stenwold Maker. He is a beetle inventor from an eclectic city-state (Collegium) known for being a melting pot of scientists and builders. We see him watch the wasps obliterate a frontier city on his continent and then head home to try and convince his people of the growing danger of the Empire. Thus begins the first arc of the series that will take us through the first four books: the First Lowlands War.
The first war arc is intense; we follow a collection of individuals from Collegium and the Wasp Empire as the war grows and evolves. After countless twists and turns the first war ends and a new status quo forms. The lowlands and the Empire are both fundamentally altered and we find ourselves with a very new political world. We then start a series of three interim books that each follow individuals from the first war as they seek out new alliances, technology, and magic to bolster their people. We explore new parts of the world we haven’t seen, meet new kinden, and Tchaikovsky’s world continues to bloom and expand past its initial boundaries. But, this era of exploration is doomed from the start, and we rapidly find ourselves descending into the Second Lowlands War by the eighth book. The final three books take us through the end of the Second Lowlands War and conclude the series with an enormous bang. Despite there already being ten books in this world—which feels like it should be enough for any writer—there are also apparently over 30 short stories and another stand-alone novel set in the same world. I read none of these because I can only cripple my reading schedule so much, but suffice it to say that Tchaikovsky really leaned into the idea of going big or going home, and he certainly didn’t go home. To top it off, all of these (and some other books of his) came out over the course of just a six-year period, which really sets the stage for Tchaikovsky’s incredible mix of speed and quality.
Anyway, I wanted to briefly start with my criticisms of the series to get them out of the way before I launch into a ballad of all the things that this series does well. My critiques of Shadows of the Apt all fall into fairly typical ones that can be seen in any author’s first work and any series of this size. For starters, many books don’t feel like discrete stories but arbitrary stopping points where Tchaikovsky was forced to cut up his 6000-page book so it could physically be printed. This is particularly apparent in the first few novels, where the stories barely feel distinct, and I cannot remember what was in any of the four specific books even though I only read them a month ago. Book one also can feel like a little bit of a rough entry as you are thrown right into the conflict and have to hit the ground running, but I can think of several series that do this worse than Apt. The biggest crime that Apt commits in my mind is having some classic giant series bloat in the middle of the between-war section. The phase two books exist more as a series of interesting standalones, and they vary wildly in their relevance to the core narrative and in their pacing. There are sections of roughly 500 pages that I feel could be easily removed with minimal loss and when you are dealing with a series that is already so big it really stands out. Then again, none of it is uninteresting or poorly written, it merely feels unfocused.
Switching to positives, the list becomes intimidatingly long. The obvious low-hanging fruit is pointing out that this is one of the most original and refreshing epic fantasies I have read. Tchaikovsky loves (and fears) bugs, a passion that influences all of his work but it is on display in rare form with this series. The incorporation of bugs and their various magics continues to delight and amaze with each new section of the story and the fun nuggets of worldbuilding never diminish even when closing out the last book. Tchaikovsky works each insect’s nature and physiology into the very culture of the people of Apt, using what we know about each species to dictate their political policy and government styles. It makes the entire story feel like an extended episode of The Magic School Bus and I learned a bunch of really interesting things about bugs in the course of reading the series. The writing is also great, despite being early in Tchaikovsky’s career. There are multiple monologues that I consider my favorite speeches, the magic and technology feel reflective of the themes of the story, and the exposition is excellent at showing instead of telling the reader what is happening.
Speaking of themes, in a 6000-page story, there is obviously going to be a boatload. While I, unfortunately, don’t have the time or space to dive into all of Tchaikovsky’s ideas, I do want to highlight his exploration of the idea of the “apt.” In this world, you are either apt or not. There is no middle ground. Those who are apt can grasp the logic of mathematics and physics and it allows them to build machines and technology. Please note that the apt is not using magic super math; any ability to grasp mathematics at all makes you apt and this is really important because the apt can’t use magic. When we are first introduced to Tchaikovsky’s world we are shown that it is in its second iteration, so to speak. Once upon a time, several bug races ruled the world with magical supremacy and kept all the other bugs in line. Then, several of the slave races discovered mathematics, became apt, and used newly built technology and machines to overthrow the status quo of the world and establish a new order. Our story is set in that new world order when mechanical marvels rule the air, sea, and ground, and places like Collegium wield enormous power due to the inventions that leave its foundries. The entire setup feels like a great metaphor for the technological leaps seen in the First World War and numerous interesting parallels explore the mindset of the times. This trope, ‘someone in a magical world invents the gun and everything changes,’ is not new. In fact, it is so old, and I am so tired of it, that I often drop books that dive into it because I feel the space has been overexplored. What is so interesting about Shadows of the Apt is that it is an inversion of this trope: the gun reigns supreme, and people start reinventing magic. It turns out that the ability to sneak into someone’s airfield and conjure a napalm strike on all of your enemy’s most valuable troops is something that is always incredibly powerful regardless of how much technology is at your disposal.
The world we peer into has been run by math for so long that people have stopped believing that magic exists. Tchaikovsky posits a world dominated by mathematical rules to the point that magic no longer exists and is near incomprehensible. Small pockets of folks across the world begin to lose their aptness and reintegrate magic and religious faith into their lives. Instead of focusing on this as solely a technological warfare clash, Tchaikovsky digs into the mentalities on either side of the aptness. So when small cabals of folks on both sides of the world lose their aptness, and start rediscovering magic and faith, it leads to a truly fascinating exploration of the clash between mentalities. The interplay between looking at the world as a mathematical equation and a magical mystery is wonderful and Tchaikovsky never favors either, simply presenting them as equally valid parallel lifepaths. When he begins to explore the intersectionality of them, things get very interesting. I love the idea of mathematics being this truly alien mentality that magic users cannot comprehend, and that the belief that the world is an ordered place made up of unbreakable natural laws means you can’t bend those laws into a magical force. There is so much to unpack here, and Tchaikovsky does a lot of it over the 6000+ pages of the series.
When it comes to cast there is a lot going on as well. While we start with a handful of characters who remain relevant from the beginning of the series to the end, the cast quickly balloons into a staggering number of fun and strange people who populate the world. Tchaikovsky, even at this early stage of his career, knows how to write a character arc and many of his myriad group of ragtag heroes and villains go through metamorphosis (both figurative and literally) to become very different beings by the end of the series. As the books go on, we get more and more perspective from the side of the Wasp Empire, and it becomes one of my favorite parts of the book. They start as the amorphous blob of hate and terror, and they also end that way because the wasps are terrifying just like in real life. However, we also get to see how they are a product of their culture and the world that built them in a way that is deeply satisfying. There is some inherent biological determinism in the book due to the fact we are basing these people on insects with distinct behavioral patterns, not just whimsical made-up cultures. However, Tchaikovsky makes sure to avoid any real-world comparisons when looking at these elements of world-building which I think is important, and we see very clearly that people are more than their biology at every turn.
Plot-wise, this is a war story and I would set expectations going in for all the things that entails. We deal with many sensitive subjects like torture, genocide, and a myriad of other literal war crimes. The series explores a number of anti-war tropes and themes, but I think its most interesting piece is how it examines the post Lowlands War political changes and how they led to a second Lowlands War. Most of the plot points can be fairly predictable, but the beauty is in the huge canvas Tchaikovsky sets up to explore them. This gives him much more space for nuance and details you don’t often get in a number of fantasy war novels. There is equal time spent on famous individuals who wage the war and the little people who are crushed beneath the merciless treads of the war machines’ wheels.
The end result of all of this is a series that stands out as one of the biggest and most interesting reads in the fantasy genre. Tchaikovsky’s lifelong passion for insects in The Shadows of the Apt is like a proverbial flame that draws me in like a moth-kinden. There isn’t a lot in the fantasy space that can scratch the same itches that Apt reaches and its grand size means that it gets into nooks and crannies that other series could only hope to touch. Apt is a fascinating read, and if you like Tchaikovsky or a large series at all, I highly recommend you check it out.
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