The extremely prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky has a lot of balls in the air, publishing about three novels a year at his current rate. If you asked what his major preoccupations were, then high on the list would be exploring non-human intelligences, and often those of evolved or uplifted animals. Bee Speaker is the third book in his occasional Dogs Of War sequence, about animals uplifted to human-level intelligence, and initially an exploration of their rights. These are books that proceed in the same universe, though, and this is set over one hundred years after the previous one, where Mars declared independence and Earth suffered a crisis. Here, Mars is answering a distress call from Bees (uplifted bees which have become a formidable distributed intelligence) and has sent a squad to help. It all goes terribly wrong almost straight away.

Bee Speaker takes a while to coalesce, partially because it's been a while since I've been in this narrative world, and the scenario is also brand new. The rescue squad (two humans, a dogform and an uplifted reptile which seems to be largely an alligator), are solid protagonists as they discover the world as much as we readers are. However, there is a local monk - Cricket - who shares a lot of early narrative lifting whose viewpoint is naive and quite tricky to get into. This is also Tchaikovsky playing in a post-apocalyptic sandpit, and so we have bunker folks with regulation sexist oligarchy foundations. This might also be one of the first times he has played with mycelial networks for another strand of the story. It all turns out to be quite a small conflict with the potential for greater disaster, and once the conflict kicks in, then it is pretty propulsive (though the rescue party splitting up at a key period is more out of a dumb horror movie than his usual smartly plotted work).

Bee Speaker is a nice, unexpected addition to this series - and gives Tchaikovsky the opportunity to play with reptile minds, and develop the idea of Bees, both as a real and virtual distributed intelligence. He writes the culture clash between the worlds well, and certainly gives himself enough room to toy with new concepts, but as ever it stands or falls on how good its central story narrative is, and happily yet again Tchaikovsky has laid out a compelling tale to hang his chamelonic alligator network analyst and mushroom witches on.

thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review! <3

’We will teach them to dream’

Bee Speaker is the third entry into Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War series, and unfortunately I did not enjoy it as much as its predecessors.

This is not to say that it was a completely unenjoyable book. I very much liked reading from the perspectives of Ada, a Martian Humaniform, Wells, a Dogform, and particularly Irae, a Dragonform, who had an incredibly unique viewpoint, and whose fluctuating moods (due to their body temperature) kept their chapters feeling fast-paced and engaging. The writing and prose were consistently good, and while I did think the book could have been shorter, the pacing was mostly well-done.

My overall issue lies with the scope of this book. What I loved about Dogs of War and even Bear Head was their focus on the politics of Earth, and humans dealing with change and societal upheaval in the face of powerful technologies like the Bioforms and conscious AI’s. Tchaikovsky has done so many space operas and far-future sci-fi’s that I was really taken by this series’s plot taking place on Earth (and sometimes Mars), and being set in our near-future. I was disappointed, and slightly irritated, that this book fell into the former typical cliche that Tchaikovsky and so many sci-fi authors have done before. Bee Speaker, in my opinion, removed most of what made this series so unique. If it wasn’t for the Bioforms, this really could just have been any other space opera.

This lack of USP was exacerbated by the stories focus on Bees, the Distributed Intelligence that has been hanging over the plot since the first book. Being a conscious and sentient ‘AI’, Bees to me has very little personality, and thus my interest in her is next to none. It is, for me at least, almost impossible to take interest in the stakes of a story revolving around an entity that I know has millions of other copies of herself elsewhere. And even if I’m not meant to root for Bees, even if I’m meant to root for the humans populating Earth after its climate collapse (another uncreative stereotype - think Mad Max with dog-people), those people were unlikeable and their POV’s lacked character and charisma. As I said before, I did care for the Martian crew, but their chapters were broken up by pages of, to be blunt, boring nothingness.

Overall, Bee Speaker gets 3/5 stars. This is definitely the weakest entry in the series for me, but I am still holding out hope for the next one!

So I haven’t read the first book in this series so was worried I wouldn’t enjoy it. The book is brilliant and I’ve bought the other books in the series to help understand the world more as these characters are just really well written and I do feel a connection to them and care about them a lot

Filled with that trademark hopefulness, morality, and dark humour, this is a wonderful return to the world of Bioforms. Bees has always been my favourite character in this series, and I was a bit disappointed that the whole novel wasn't narrated in their voice (which is marvellously unique and full of dry wit). It took me a while to warm up to the multiple points of view - thematically, it makes sense for a story about Distributed Intelligence to be distributed among multiple characters, yes, but it also distributes my depth of connection - but it was rewarding when all the disparate parts came together. I especially loved the Martian characters and the alternative worldview they offered.

A group of Martian bioforms respond to a distress signal from Earth. Instead of helping, everything immediately goes terribly wrong. I am so excited to have recieved this ARC. I'm a fan of Tchaikovsky's writing and absolutely devoured Dogs of War, the first book in this series.

The Good:
- Most of the characters are super interesting. There's no clichés here. My favourite is Irae, easily. But I also appreciated Cricket, Serval and Wells.
- I really like the fragmented way of reading the events unfolding from constantly changing perspectives. It's a unique way of storytelling.

The Could Be Better:
- There's a lot of exposition of the world and background events. Could've done with less, especially for a better balance in the book.
- Not necessarily negative or anything: but I really enjoyed how each character perspective in Dogs of War sounded so unique. Here some spoken text will have differences from character to character, but the thoughts are in the same style.

The Bad:
- Nothing really, I enjoyed myself!

In conclusion this was another fun foray into his writing. The balance/pace could've been better but overall the story gripped me. Thanks NetGalley and Head of Zeus for providing me with an eARC. All thoughts are my own.

ARC provided by NetGalley.

When getting this book to review, two parts of my life came to mind: buying second hand books from the store near my school, and my first experiences of volunteer work.

An odd way to start the review, fair, but they both heavily influenced how I felt about the book.

When I was younger, my main source of books was a second hand book store, leaving options limited and eclectic, and I would often pick up the second or third book in a series as my first foray in a setting. Bee Speaker being the 3rd in a series of books and my first Tchaikovsky book gave the read the feeling of there being a bigger world that I was not fully aware of, which was surprisingly refreshing. It made a story which has only three locations feel much wider and part of a real world. I also appreciated that despite that feeling of there being a larger world, everything was made clear quickly and succinctly, never leaving me feel lost in what was happening or who we were talking about.

The other part of my life which came to mind as I was reading was, as mentioned above, my first experiences of volunteer work. The story of Bee Speaker is as follows: a team of people from the human colony of Mars return to Earth to try and help after receiving a distress call, and in trying to help, make everything hit the fan at record speed. People setting out to change the world often go into it with visions of a changed world, only to be confronted with the realities of how hard the world is to change, and that seems to be a big part of the idea behind the story. Add in an interesting take on AI, genetically engineered dogs, reptiles and transhumanist Martians in a world destroyed by unbridled capitalism and post-ai dependence on unsustainable tech, and you've got a setting with some fun chaos to offer.

Tchaikovsky writes extremely well, with a voice which stands distinctly apart from other authors, and feels erudite, thoughtful and down to earth all at the same time, and allows for the book to almost feel like someone telling you an anecdote from their own lives. Throughout beekeeper there is a large cast of POVs, giving us an understanding of events from all sides of the discussion, often switching between characters who are antagonistic towards each other as they are interacting, and letting us get a full 360 shot of quite a few scenes.

A great time, a great and quick read, Tchaikovsky has jumped up higher on my TBR.

My review of this unusual book will be pretty much the same as with all the other books I have read by this talented author.
For a long time in this book, I do feel that, although incredibly well written, Mr Tchaikovsky would never dream of writing six words when twenty-four would say the same thing, albeit in a more clever way. Although this works well in literary fiction, I am never sure that it keeps the attention of science fiction addicts like me.
However, once past half way (and that is a lot of words already - these books are always very long), the book becomes absolutely compulsive reading. Even if you know that there is still the equivalent size of a normal book to go.
I do have a tendency to speed read, but despite my earlier comments, I find I cannot do this with these books as the sentences are so well crafted, they are a delight to read; yet it does make the earlier parts of the novel seem to work at a glacial pace. However I don't feel that in the later stages. Sometimes I did wish I could have just picked up this book, and the others, half way through!
I did enjoy the somewhat funny bits!
But the stories, the imagination, and the excellent ideas - spot on. This is why I continue to read books by this author, but do have to set aside a chunk of time to do so.

It's not that Adrian Tchaikovsky never does a series that's advertised as such, of course he does, but I do appreciate how often he'll put out what feels like, and works as, a perfectly satisfactory self-contained book, and then a few years later he clearly has an idea for what might happen after that, and so on. So Dogs Of War, about genetically manipulated animals being used in near-future human wars, was complete in itself, but still provided a world that could be picked up again a generation down the line in the Mars colonisation and culture wars of Bear Head. And again, that didn't leave things hanging in a bad way, but nor does it feel superfluous for Bee Speaker to check in again after another century or two.

At this point, the most obvious thing to mention about the timeline is that it's not going great. The first two books weren't exactly cheery; they were borderline cyberpunk, all unrestrained capitalism, the human love of hierarchy and excuses for cruelty, othering and persecution run rampant. But things can only go on like that for so long, and now those times are the Old, back before the General Collapse. And looking at the quotes I've put down from this, most of them are pithy summaries of the various interlocking disasters and humanity's head-in-sand refusal to do anything about them, but I'm not sure I actually need to include them here because you're all living through it, same as I am. As for what comes after, among the few survivors in a broken world, well, Tchaikovsky is hardly the first to suggest that the next dark age will have a lot in common with the last one, but the way so many tech bros openly see themselves as warlords, fantasise about the martial brotherhoods they'll assemble in their strongholds, gives it all a nasty extra resonance; the bunker having heralds with airhorns was a particularly deft horror.

And into this neo-barbaric landscape, with occasional monastic islands retaining faltering knowledge of what humanity was once able to achieve, plunges a well-meaning delegation from the Mars colony, which has in many respects ended up doing better than Earth since the collapse, simply because they're in such an inhospitable place that if people there hadn't got past our long-standing failure states, they'd all have died. So they genuninely do believe in co-operation, instead of just paying lip service to the notion, and they have brilliant technological fixes, and not just the usual political pretence of good intentions, but the real thing. None of which prevents their arrival from upending a delicate balance of power, setting various Earth factions at each other's throats, and generally making a massive mess of things.

Given this bleak opening position, the book does manage a surprising quantity of laughs, especially in the sections from the viewpoint of hapless monk Cricket and terrifying augmented reptile Irae. It also ends up getting across some wholesome messages without being inartistic about it, and sure, you could argue that there's nothing new about suggesting that an existence with no goal beyond surviving is not likely to be an existence that's worth very much; that really, it would be much better to keep Earth habitable than try to make a go of it on Mars; that concepts like pride and honour mainly seem to be good for getting people killed, usually not the right people, and maybe it would be good to move beyond that. But equally, it's not like any of that really seems to have sunk in terribly well so far, is it? Fairer, I think, to suggest that a lot of the material Tchaikovsky is working with here (distributed intelligences, capitalism's inability to correct its own death spiral, even the protagonist who'd rather not be involved in the whole terrifying situation) is familiar from many of his recent books. Also that, like almost any classic Doctor Who story longer than four episodes, Bee Speaker could have been shorter by at least one capture/escape/recapture cycle without losing much – and that it didn't need to give away its endgame on the cover. But if it's not one to rank with Tchaikovsky's best, nor does it disgrace the surprising degree of quality control he somehow maintains in tandem with his superhuman workrate.

(Netgalley ARC)

First of all, I read through the previous Dogs of War books in preparation to review this one properly. I'll be honest, the first two hit harder than this one since those hit closer to home while this one is more "far out". It's set in a time that's beyond ours currently.

Just like the other books, it makes you think about how humanity evolves and its creations and how the creations in the end are still similar to its creators, good and bad.

Bee Speakers, in my opinion, is a great book and sequel, but is harder to read/follow with its even more amount of POV's than the previous books combined. It made it quite a bit harder to read through. (Over a whopping 60 chapters!)

I am leaning into "spoiler" territory, but it does make you feel hard to place emotions and I would say you could compare it to certain moments in the Horizon series (video games). If you know, you know.

I am curious what a fourth book would bring, if there will be one.

Buzz out!

As someone who isn't that much into scifi, I thought this was a really good book. The plot and the technology were very enjoyable ; but also, it can be read without having even touched the other books in the series.

Returning readers of this blog know that I love reading a good Adrian Tchaikovsky book, and with Bee Speaker he delivers again. This is the third book in the Bioforms (or Dogs of War) series, but each book can be read as a standalone with returning characters. This time, Bees takes centre stage. Or do they? The distributed intelligence of genetically and cybernetically enhanced bees may be the focal point of the book, but in this story in particular, it’s the cast of characters that makes it. The setting is post-apocalyptic Earth in a way that has a distinctly Fallout theme to it, but less irradiated, and characters from the less badly affected Mars have come to Earth to try and help out. It does not go well. Standout characters include Irae, the mercurial reptillian Bioform whose thinking changes with the heat dial they adjust on their clothes; Serval, the guiding hand to her warrior tyrant husband in their bunker of testosterone-filled ex-mercenary descendents; Wells, a dog Bioform engineer whose nose is confused by Earth and looks so montrous that people fear her despite her initially gentle nature and Cricket, a young Apiary monk in way over his head.

It’s a lot smaller scale than most of Tchaikovsky’s novels, focused on a small and varied collection of communities and people trying to eke out a life in the more dangerous and backwards remains of civilisation. The Old, as they call it, is still around them, though, preserved in small pockets, and the coming of far more advanced visitors from Mars with no notion of how volatile things can be throws what was a carefully controlled balance up into the air. It’s quite a different story from the first two Bioform books, but I enjoyed it for what it was and was happy to get a new take on the setting.

Disclaimer: I received an advanced reader copy of this book via NetGalley and my opinion is entirely my own.

Adrian Tchaikovsky has built a career out of personifying the other. From the spiders in Children of Time, to the Shrouded in Shroud, Tchaikovsky has a knack for instilling emotional heart into monstrous and scary creatures.

The Dogs of War series is no exception. Featuring bear scholars, war machine dogs and hyper-intelligent bees, the series is built on putting the person into the monster and the monster into the person. Bee Speaker continues this theme and does a brilliant job at it.

Set well into the future, after the collapse of Earth society, a group of Martians, bioforms and modified humans alike, receive a signal requesting help from Earth and set out to do just that.

What follows is an enduring mystery that slowly unravels, as the Martians struggle to acclimatise to Earth in both a physical sense, and a societal one. The story is delivered across multiple perspectives, with each character having well-defined and unique voices. The perspective shifts serve to show the narrative in different lights and fleshes out the story. Tchaikovsky masterfully builds the tension in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout. Irae is a standout character, a “glass lizard” who teeters on the edge of madness, blurring the lines between person and monster. Tchaikovsky uses a unique prose style for Irae that is in itself skitterish and unstable that really builds on the character.

Bee Keeper really is a spectacular novel and well worth the read, even if you haven't read the prior ones in the series. While they are set in the same universe, the Dogs of War books quite easily can be read as standalone novels. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Tchaikovsky is fast becoming one of my favourite authors.

I read both earlier entries in the Dogs of War series earlier this year, going in expecting fast-paced action centred around a giant military dog. What I got instead was a thoughtful and compelling exploration of AI, humanity, and the often blurry line between the two. The first two books dig deeply into these themes, so a third instalment along the same lines might have risked feeling repetitive. Fortunately, Tchaikovsky seems to agree, as the third book takes the series in a new direction.

Set several centuries after the events of the second book, this story trades the near-future sci-fi setting for a post-collapse, dystopian world with a distinctly fantasy-like atmosphere. I haven’t read Tchaikovsky’s fantasy work before, but it’s clear he’s comfortable in the genre. The worldbuilding is imaginative and intriguing: a mysterious hooded religious order devoted to Bees, bunkers filled with sword-wielding barbarian men, roaming 'witches' who gather fungi and share knowledge with passing villages. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but surprisingly it all fits together quite well.

The narrative is told through a range of POVs, which helps create a rich, layered story. However, I felt we didn’t get to stay with any one character long enough to really connect with them. Irae’s chapters were a highlight, but still didn’t quite reach the emotional impact of Rex, Honey, or Jimmy from the earlier books.

I enjoyed this entry, but it’s the weakest of the series for me. That’s largely due to the shift in focus from the political and ethical questions surrounding bioforms and AI to the themes of communication and cultural relationships with technology. It’s still a strong book, just a different kind of story than its predecessors.

Thank you to Head of Zeus for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I went into Bee Speaker with high hopes. Both Dogs of War and Bear Head impressed me, and I was curious to see where Tchaikovsky would take us next. Two centuries have passed since the last book, and now the action shifts to a ravaged Earth and a thriving Mars. Tchaikovsky is especially good at throwing together a mismatched crew in a hostile environment and making you interested in them.

The premise is solid. A cryptic distress signal from Earth draws a group of genetically engineered Martians back to the planet of their origin. Things fall apart quickly, and what starts as a help mission turns into pure chaos. There are techno-Feudal warlords, a strange religious order devoted to the outlawed Bee intelligence, and a still-functioning remnant of old-world tech in the form of the Factory. It’s a world of broken allegiances, stubborn survivors, and hard decisions.

Where the book falters, for me, is in the way it’s told. The choice to structure it with over 60 chapters through the eyes of nine main characters makes the story feel cluttered. Time and time again, I was essentially reading the same scene again, just from a different point of view. Initially, it was interesting, but after some time the structure tired me a bit. Some characters felt vibrant and necessary. Others, not so much.

Then there’s the info-dumping. I get that we’re jumping 200 years ahead, and some context is needed. But the pacing took a hit every time the story paused to rehash events or dive into background explanations that didn’t always feel urgent or fresh. I didn’t mind being reminded of the past books, but I didn’t need to be reminded quite so often, or so thoroughly.

That said, Tchaikovsky’s imagination is still firing on all cylinders. The Bees remain one of the coolest ideas in the series. There’s a lot of richness here, even if it’s sometimes buried beneath repetition.

The ending is satisfying, but not shocking. It ties up this chapter nicely and leaves room for more. And I’ll likely read the next one if it comes, because despite my frustrations, this world is interesting.

So, is Bee Speaker worth reading? If you’ve come this far with the series, yes, absolutely. Just don’t expect the same momentum or clarity you found in the earlier books. It’s a good story caught in a slightly unwieldy frame. Not a misfire, but not a masterpiece either.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the most prolific author working in today’s science fiction field. He also consistently manages to create engaging adventure stories combined with thought-provoking ideas. As a case in point, last year’s Alien Clay spun a tale of political prisoners incarcerated on a planet with a deadly – and very strange – biosphere, while also subverting and reimagining what it is to be a dissident and how the systems of power created to grind down opposition can be rendered useless with a shift in perspective. Likewise, the latest instalment in his Children’s Series – Children of Memory – has a multi-species crew (including humans and portiid spiders) trying to unravel the mystery of a human colony that shouldn’t exist while narratively dissecting what it means to be sentient, the different modes of sentience that can arise and how easy it is to ascribe sentience to something when it’s not really there.

Bee Speaker is the third instalment of Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War Series, driven by another big idea about ‘uplifted animals’ that have been operated on to create intelligence and sometimes physically changed as well in order to better do humanity’s bidding. The creation of an animal slave species is obviously an ethical minefield, which is explored in earlier books in the series. But in the world of Bee Speaker, time has moved on and animal ‘bioforms’ have been emancipated and are viewed as ‘people’ just like everybody else – at least on the nascent human colony on Mars, where humans had to operate on and change their own biology to survive.

While Earth has slid into a post-apocalyptic dark ages with different groups struggling for control or simple survival, Mars's colony was guided away from certain doom by the intervention of Bees – a distributed intelligence existing across an uplifted swarm of actual bees.
The colony on Mars don’t know much about what’s happening on Earth as most of the technology that could transmit a signal to them has broken down during the collapse. But then they receive a distress call from ‘another’ Bees and send a small group to help. That’s when things start to go wrong.

The post-collapse landscape of Earth is peppered with different groups: bunker-dwellers who horde the weapons they’ve stockpiled in order to lord it over everyone else; bioform factories which stand as islands of still-functioning tech from the before times; an apiary run by an order of monks, devoted to preserving what knowledge of old Earth they can; and simple villagers trying to build a life on whatever tracts of less-polluted land they can salvage. But none of these things is exactly what it seems, just like none of the people the Martians meet can be taken on face value.

Tchaikovsky pushes these familiar post-apocalyptic scenarios into new and sometimes surprising territory, while also delivering an action-filled tale as the Martian team – which features two very entertaining bioforms, the ‘good dog’ Wells and the insanely contrary ‘dragon’ Irae – try to make sense of things and help who they can without getting killed in the process. But within all that, there’s also a fascinating inspection of distributed intelligence, what it can be and do, and how it might be a danger to every living thing on Earth. Because while Bees is the only distributed intelligence on Mars, Earth is far older and far more complex.

Bee Speaker is another top-notch science fiction tale from an author who – at least so far – can do no wrong.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Head of Zeus who provided me with an Advance Review Copy.

I am grateful to NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. 

‘Bee Speaker’ is a new novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It is the third instalment of his ‘Dogs of War’ science-fiction series, set in a future where genetically engineered Bioforms live alongside humans. Although I have not read the first two books of the series, I did not sense I was significantly missing out on any background or context in this book. It is a riveting story, something of a ‘First Encounter” between humans and non-humans. Entertaining and thought-provoking throughout, with a fine ending. I greatly enjoyed it and look forward to reading the first two books in the series.

The setting is as follows (paraphrased from the publishers description).

The end of the world has come and gone. Humanity has bled almost to death from a thousand cuts. While Earth fell apart, on the almost forgotten colony on Mars, engineered humans and beasts aided by Bees and their Distributed Intelligence, has survived and thrived, becoming an independent entity over the generations with little to connect them to their ancestors on Earth. Until a signal arrives, begging for help…


What happens next is the story told, from multiple perspectives, in this book. What could go wrong ? Well, the reader will soon find that pretty much everything could and does go wrong.

This book has a lot of characters and communities. The population on Earth has decreased and humans have abandoned cities and major population areas. The surviving communities pretty much live a subsistence lifestyle, with some groups having a little more technology and therefore hegemony than others. Conflict is common, alliances shaky with various superstitions and folk-traditions becoming commonplace. Some groups have old and failing technology while others attempt to retain human knowledge for a better future. Then there are the groups with weapons who use them or the threaten violence to pursue their aims.

In short, a desperate mess of humanity, lacking any unity or cooperation. The remaining humans face an even bleaker future without external help.

The initial chapters set the scene. A dystopian Earth of course, but with some human communities having Bioform dogs . Physically powerful and sentient creatures, they are largely equivalent to their humans partners, although feared and distrusted by many.

Mr Tchaikovsky’s books rapidly grab the readers attention and this is certainly the case with “Bee Speaker”. The plots are exciting and the cast of humans and other Spacers is always fascinating. What I enjoy most are what has formed these characters, what makes them who they are and how they think. And most of all, the relationships they build, cultivate and cherish. In this book, relationships within and between various groups of humans and ‘human-adjacent sentience’. The plot unfolds from several perspectives, with multiple protagonists providing the reader with their thoughts amongst the fears and uncertainty of their lives.

And into this dysfunctional Earth, the arrival of a small expedition of capable and carefully selected Martians, returning to their ancestral home to provide much-needed help. That is the plan anyway.
The four Martians are a mix of the lifeforms that have evolved on Mars. Far in advance of humans in many ways. Not only in technology but also their worldview and attitudes to other lifeforms. Intelligence and societal governance is more advanced than Earth has ever been. Peaceful solutions and cooperation have been essential to their survival on a hostile planet. They do not see themselves as Humans. There was much discussion about even sending help to Earth. A distant planet which has largely lost contact with the Mars Colony over generations. Yet their advanced and benevolent society concluded, not entirely by consensus, that helping their very distant ancestors was the right thing to do.

The Martians who arrived on Earth are a diverse group. Democratic in leadership, individualistic in their outlook on Earth and their views of the human inhabitants. And to further complicate matters, the Earth environment, climate, atmosphere and gravity is having exaggerated influence on their physiology and thought processes. Beyond what they had expected. I loved these otherworldly characters. They are the heart and soul of this book. And the action and excitement as well. The Martian society may be far advanced in behavioural terms, but there are still signs in their DNA of their human and animal origins, both strengths and weaknesses. Instincts are near the surface as they encounter this ancestral planet of Earth. Once they enter the plot, we see the story from their perspective as well. This is a particularly attractive part of Mr Tchaikovsky writing. Seeing and feeling a foreign world from a Martian point of view. And the Martian characters have a wide range of feelings and opinions about their mission, particularly when things go wrong !

This brings us to another fascinating aspect of the story. Earth societies are a mess. How will the people respond to the arrival of a group of strangers, in their eyes barely resembling humans and some of them closer to medieval beasts. One would think (hope ?) that failing societies would be grateful or at least open to external assistance. It goes without saying, events do not progress as planned. There is death and mayhem amongst the fear and misunderstanding. Also some fine examples of tolerance, benevolence, dignity and bravery. It is probably not hard to guess which groups display the more humane characteristics.

I loved the plot developments and many of the side stories of life on Mars and Earth. As in his other books, Mr Tchaikovsky injects humour into the plot, amongst the action and excitement. One Martian character is particularly snarky in thought and speech. Laugh-out-loud hilarious sometimes ! An example is his initial impressions of life on Earth:

It is truly amazing how many flavours of dumbness an apocalypse can spawn.

The other Martian character tend to be more cerebral, thoughtful and compassionate. The reader will enjoy these characters as well, with their admirable aims and determination to help the dysfunctional human communities, come what may.

Bees play a role as well, but not until the latter stages of the book. Whilst AI is the current obsession in the Technology industry today, perhaps mankind should prepare for what might come next. Distributed Intelligence, or DisInt. The Bees have this attribute and consequently have comprehension, thoughts and actions proportional to their numbers. And they can quickly increase to very, very large numbers, consequently achieving superior influence and power. The Bees role on Mars is portrayed as not entirely benign, but enabling and then almost separate to the Martian society and its evolution. The reader will wonder what role Bees might play on a messed-up Earth. Almost as a side story, DisInt has become a part of some humans on Earth, albeit in a basic, limited mode. This adds richness and colour to the story and enables twists and turns in the plot.

The conclusion and what may happen next is somewhat unexpected, poignant, a little bitter-sweet yet satisfying. Thought-provoking and offering tentative optimism.

I would recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed Mr Tchaikovsky’s other books. While the plots is certainly compelling and imaginative, it is the character development that really stands out. Particularly with the Martians visitors. Deep, rich, believable characters with all the flaws and strengths one might hope to find in such a story.

Which brings me to my one, small quibble. Very small. The book has a lot of moving parts; distinct entities and characters. I care less for some of them, not due to their behaviour or actions, but due to a lack of background. Not knowing very much about their past and how they came to be. Perhaps this is something developed in the first two books of the series ? One or two characters could have been omitted from this book and the plot would not have been greatly affected. This might have allowed for a deeper, richer character development for some of the secondary yet important characters.

I finished reading this book about a week ago and it is still fresh in my memory and will, I expect, remain there for a long time. It has been a pleasure writing this review, revisiting the fascinating plot, a ‘First Contact’ of sorts. Exploring themes of communication, comprehension, learning, trust and benevolence between cultures and species. And of course revisiting with the memorable characters, particularly the Martians. I do hope Mr Tchaikovsky is able to weave some of them into his future writing plans. ‘Bee Speaker’ is a Great Read and a wonderful addition to Mr Tchaikovsky’s body of work. I wish him all the very best with the publication.

Adrian Tchaikovsky never disappoints. When I pick up one of his books I know I am going to have a good time, while also having my brain stretched in the best possible way. "Dogs of War" is a favourite of mine, so it was a pleasure to meet some other Bioforms stuck in a very different situation, a long time in the future from the previous books in the series.
The pace is fast, the danger is at times visceral and the inter-factional conflicts are realistic and difficult to resolve. At the same time, there is humour (albeit sometimes black) and friendship (albeit often snarky). The situation of a small, close-knit team finding themselves in a hostile alien environment they must learn to understand and work with in order to survive will be familiar to readers of Tchaikovsky's other works.
I was hooked from the beginning and raced through to the end, and even though there are nine point-of-view characters, each one was completely distinctive and I never came close to forgetting who was who.
Although this can absolutely be read as a stand-alone, I think it gains more depth if you are familiar with the other two novels in the series. I hope there will be a fourth some time.

It is truly amazing how many flavours of dumb an apocalypse can spawn. [loc. 1990]
Third in the series that began with Dogs of War and continued with Bear Head. The time is about two centuries after the events of Bear Head, and three generations after the fall of the Old ('the world that once was') due to failure of the global information network, in a 'deluge of artificially-generated false testimony' exarcerbated by climate disaster. Human existence on Earth is now rather dystopian, as a group of Martians discover when they respond to a distress call.

The Crisis Crew team consists of two humans (Tecomo and Ada) and two Bioforms -- genetically and biologically engineered animals, originally created to serve humans, now regarded as people and part of a thriving Martian society. One of the Bioforms is a Dogform, Wells, who is overwhelmed by the sheer sensory input of Earth: the other is a Dragonform, Irae, who is the best character in the book. (Not in a moral sense. Definitely not in a moral sense.)

The call they answered came from the Factory, which still makes dogforms (though their process is more brutal, less high-tech, than the original Bioforms). Cricket, a young monk from the Apiary (where they cherish and worship Bees), encounters the 'monsters' on his way to the Factory, and finds himself involved in momentous events. The inhabitants of the Griffin Bunker are determined to fight to preserve their feudal society; a Distributed Intelligence is roaming the countryside in a number of bodies; the monks have a secret, and the Bunker another.

I'm not super-keen on post-apocalyptic stories, but this was fun. There are nine narrators, each with a distinctive voice (an achievement in itself) and a different set of prejudices, beliefs, and traits. Four of those narrators identify as female, and there's a non-viewpoint character who is clearly trans. Though almost all of the story takes place on Earth, we get a good idea of how the Martian colony has evolved and transformed. Earth, meanwhile, is not devoid of Old People, which in this novel means a person from before the apocalypse.

Fascinating characters, clever plot, themes of transformation and of personhood -- and, of course, a close-knit team dealing with an alien, technologically-backward culture.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 5th June 2025.

Thank you to Netgalley and Head of Zeus for providing an digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I always have a good time with Tchaikovsky’s, without fail. Even when he’s not firing on all cylinders he is head and shoulders above most of his peers in the field. Thankfully for us then he is not only firing on all cylinders with Bee Speaker, the engine has also been overclocked and topped off with jet-fuel.

A fantastic book containing all the best elements of the previous two instalments in the Dogs of War series, but also bringing fresh new ingredients. New characters, new technology (or corrupted versions of The Old), new situations and settings.

It speaks to Tchaikovsky’s skill that he is able to tell a (insanely) complicated story from a dizzying array of POV characters without the reader ever becoming confused as to who is speaking, what they want and what their unique spin on the events are.

Fun from start to finish, with emotion, mystery, action and an underpinning of thought provoking philosophy.

I hope there’s a fourth book in the series.

I loved the first two books in the series, and this was an excellent addition. Set 200 years after the others, it was an interesting look into the future of mankind.

A colony on Mars has survived, and thrived, despite the odds, and four of its inhabitants travel to Earth after receiving a distress call. But when they arrive on a Mad Max-style dystopian Earth, things start to go wrong quickly.

There is a myriad of characters, each one different, and it's down to the author's skill that you can keep pace with everything that's going on. The plot is fast paced, and the story is gripping, with a satisfying ending and, hopefully, more books to come! I highly recommend the whole series.

Many thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for this advance copy.