Firewalkers

Firewalkers by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The first review on GR! :)

I was pretty thrilled to get the copy on Netgalley. So much so that I had to read it the same day. Am I nuts? Or am I just a Firewalker at heart?

Gritty, depressing, and like a Hobbsian nightmare, these people live in a hothouse city on life support, barely kept alive because it is the base and the tether to the orbiting space station. Its people barely scrape by while the Roach Motel that takes in all the dignitaries and the rich are kept in Air Conditioned luxury.

Sounds rather familiar. Doesn't it? Well, Firewalkers are the ragged teams of poverty-ridden go-getters that fix the things that not even the robots can fix. They are the ones that get things working, but they're expendable and most of these young kids never come back from the near-apocalyptic desert surrounding the town.

The context is emotionally painful and takes up a large portion of the character building, but it's when the novella takes off into the wild that I was most thrilled.

I loved the tight team. I LOVED all the discoveries. No spoilers, but damn, Tchaikovsky has a huge fascination with creepy crawlies and programmed personalities, no?

The adventure is large, the stakes larger, and the end was super satisfying. I'm super glad I got my greedy hands on it.

'Nuff said.

A thrilling epic scifi novella, Firewalkers follows the children responsible for maintaining the solar panels on a dystopian future world. With almost poetic pacing and sympathetic characters, this original and refreshing novel is a must-read for fans of science fiction who hunger for something slightly out of the norm.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing an advanced copy in exchange for an honest opinion.

There can be little doubt that Adrian Tchaikovsky is among the most talented, creative and also versatile SFF authors of today.

In Firewalkers he crafts an utterly bleak world, devastated by runaway global warming that has rendered huge regions of the Earth uninhabitable desert, complete dead zones. The rich have packed up and left for space via space elevators stationed along the equator, taking much of the Earth's most valuable resources with them. Firewalkers are the brash young troubleshooters that venture out into the wasteland to troubleshoot critical infrastructure problems. Many never return.

The story follows a team of three close friends, Firewalkers stationed at the base of a space elevator located in west Africa. They are sent out to find and repair the source of increasingly more severe power supply disruptions from the vast fields of solar arrays located within the nearby dead zone. The suspense and mystery build as the team sets out among the barren landscape and the aging ruins of human civilization abandoned long ago. In the midst of the dead zone they come to the vast underground ruins of the facility setup by the rich for the construction of their spaceship and make a shocking discovery, something forgotten from the past that has a new agenda, with chilling implications for the future.

The themes here are not dissimilar to those Tchaikovsky took on in his marvelous Children of Time and Children of Ruin books. Science and technology run amok, developing and evolving in completely unforeseen ways, with surprising and devastating consequence.

This book had two principal effects on me. One was to make me really, really want to read <i>Shadows of the Apt</i>. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s been one of those people in the “I’ve heard his name, and I should get to him at some point, but really I’ve got so many books to read that if I’m being honest I probably never will” category, but after reading <i>Firewalkers</i> he’s getting bumped way up Mount Readmore.

The other thing this book did was really, really piss me off.

Let me start with the premise. This is a dystopian book, as I seem to be reading a lot of lately. In this particular flavor of dystopia, humanity has managed to thoroughly fuck up the climate. Things generally suck for everybody, and the equatorial regions are getting hot enough that they’re basically uninhabitable. However, there are generation ships being built, to carry humanity to safety … or at least that segment of humanity who can afford it. Everyone else? Sucks to be you.

The anchor points for the space elevators to the generation ships are on the equator, however. This means that despite the general unlivability of the area there do have to be settlements there. The protagonists of <i>Firewalkers</i> scrape a living working outside of the shelter of the settlement to service the solar fields that keep the A/C on for the rich folks waiting to ascend the space elevator. “Firewalker” is their title, and given how freaking hot it is - daytime temps of 140F/60C are mentioned as typical - it is appropriate.

The three protagonists - kids, really, all under 20 - are Mao (the grandson of Vietnamese workers who initially built the elevator, there being lots of Vietnamese at the time needing a place to go that wasn’t underwater); Lupé, a descendant of the local African people; and Hotep, who was actually born on one of the generation ships, but was sent back down to Earth by her parents who didn’t want to deal with her “abnormal” behavior (it’s pretty clear she’s on the neuroatypical spectrum). The plot centers around the three of them being offered a very well-paying job, but one that requires going much deeper into the desert than anyone has gone for a very long time. The desert where the wealthy segments of society conducted all sorts of research, done in such remote locations because of concerns of industrial espionage. Those facilities have been abandoned for a long time, but there are rumors that “abandoned” doesn’t necessarily mean “dead.”

Not going to go into any detail of the plot, but I will say that it’s fairly short, tightly plotted (this is a book that takes place over a few days), and mostly fairly hard science fiction with a generous sprinkling of horror.

So why, you may ask, did this book piss me off so much? Because of the sheer injustice of it all. The people going up the elevator and leaving the Earth are the exact same ones who broke it in the first place. Mao and Lupé are just people trying to make do in a world they aren’t responsible for, literally risking their lives so that the people who wrecked everything can have comfortable air conditioning in the brief time they wait to go up the elevator. And they seem almost <i>resigned</i> to it. That’s not even right - they’re not “resigned” to it any more than I’m “resigned” to the sky being blue. It’s just the way it is. The message here isn’t subtle, and it left me furious at the world, guilty over my privileged place in it, and depressed at my powerlessness to change things.

It’s not such a difficult thing to tug a reader’s heartstrings. But stirring this kind of reaction without something as crude as shooting poor Old Yeller is a real indicator of a craftsman at work. Highly recommended if you're looking for a quick, intense read that'll stick with you for a while.

Firewalkers was a book I was extremely excited for, as it is a sci-fi/speculative novella written by the award-winning Adrian Tchaikovsky, who I had heard really great things about, but haven’t made time to read yet.

The story is set on earth in a near/distant future where climate change has completely changed the landscape of the world. Population is much smaller and people have condensed into smaller communities, creating cities with extremely diverse cultures, languages, religions, and overall worldviews. In this world, the rich are able to buy their way off the planet and to a much easier life aboard the Grand Celeste, a giant space-cruiser city with all the luxuries the rich are accustomed to and none of the hardships of the nearly-destroyed earth. Back on earth, though, people are subjected to the extremely difficult living conditions of a world completely altered by climate change. Work is scarce, and water even more so. One of the only good jobs that exist is that of a firewalker.

Firewalkers are sent off into the desolate areas far from the cities to fix issues that arise with the barely-functioning power systems, among other things. They are skilled and, usually, young because it is a job that’s hard on the body and difficult to maintain for a long period of time. This story follows three such firewalkers (Mao, Lupé, and Hotep), all nineteen or so, that are sent on a job to figure out why the city’s hotel for the rich is having such difficulty getting the air conditioner units to work as fully as they have in the past. Over the course of the story, our firewalkers go on a road-trip of sorts to discover who (or what) is using up all of the power.

This story is so well-developed, and its themes of climate change and class are extremely timely. The characters are diverse and view the world in different ways, but still manage to be friends at the end of the day. Genre-wise, Firewalkers is, I think, best described as hard sci-fi. However, I think it’s a very approachable version of hard sci-fi, as the story sits in a space somewhere between post-apocalyptic, dystopian, and science fiction. There is very little romance, so don’t worry about that being an issue here. The story is mostly focused on its themes and its friendships, and both of these things are well-conceived and well-done.

I will say that this book was a little difficult for me to fully emerge myself into, and I had trouble fully connecting with some of the characters. I loved Hotep, and think she was brilliantly conceived and portrayed. However, I had trouble fully relating to Mao, and he was the main character for most of the story. I wish we had gotten some scenes from Hotep’s perspective, like we did for both Mao and Lupé, because I think it would have added a lot to the story as a whole. In addition, there was a lot of slang used throughout the dialogue of the book, and some of the slang was specific to this story and showed the mixing of of all the languages of this city. I thought this was interesting, but it took me out of the story several times, unfortunately, because I had to figure out exactly what the characters were trying to say.

All in all, I think this book will rate around 3.5 stars for me, rounded up to 4 stars, because of how much I enjoyed the story thematically. I recommend this to people who are fans of this genre, enjoy stories with progressive themes regarding class or climate, or are a particular fan of this author.

I received an arc of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review, but it hasn’t affected my review of the book whatsoever.

A very good novel in a young adult science-fiction after post apocalyptic scenery.
I appreciated that the post apocalyptic aspect wasn't too much moralising, letting the place for the story to unfold and expand, as an inventive and rather creepy tale!
I also loved the three main characters, each one has a credible and nuance personality, without tiresome stereotype. The psychology was sane and believable.
A very good story, with characters in 3D a strong atmosphere - as in all the author's books I've read so far.
A superb read!

After devouring Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War, I promised myself to read more of his books. A wise decision. Not only is he one of the most versatile and prolific fiction authors at the moment, but he also delivers every single time.

In Firewalkers, he looks at the world devastated by climate collapse, and its social and economic consequences. The ultra-rich escape the wastelands and enjoy wealthy lives in the space. The poor left behind try to survive on Earth. Firewalkers maintain infrastructure and repair solar panels in the deserts. They’re expendable, and many of them never return from their missions. The world after the climate collapse is hot. Like 140F/60C hot. Firewalkers’ job wreaks bodies and minds. They’re doing their best to survive and keep their humanity even though they have no hope for a better tomorrow.

Make no mistake - it’s not a hopeful book. It’s bleak, gritty and depressing. It’s also so damn unfair. Firewalkers die serving people who ruined the Earth but can afford to pack their families and enjoy luxuries elsewhere.

The story follows a team of three close friends, who can earn a lot of money by doing a dangerous job. They need to identify and repair the source of power supply disruptions that influence the work of the air conditioner units of the city’s hotel for the rich. The team enters the abandoned underground ruins of human civilization. Their discovery is shocking and deals with science and technology getting out of control. I can’t get into details lest there be spoilers.



Think of Firewalkers as of hard sci-fi with a soul. It focuses on science and technology but never forgets about characters and their interactions. Additionally, it paints a cynical vision of a stratified society in which caring for others rarely happens. I found it fascinating and disturbing in equal measures. The poor live in hovels, often sharing a single room between the whole family. Most of them die of skin cancer long before they reach their forties.

The three protagonists, Mao, Lupé, and Hotep are likable, although I found Hotep most interesting and Mao the least interesting of the three. And that’s a problem since we follow the story mostly through Mao‘s POV. The other thing that irked me was the tiring use of a slang mixing all the languages of the city. An interesting and realistic choice, but at times difficult to enjoy.

Despite its minor flaws, Firewalkers is a quality science-fiction gem. Tchaikovsky weaves an all-too-plausible tale of environmental collapse and its consequences. He has something intelligent to say even while keeping the action junkies satisfied.

Not surprisingly, a strong work by a respected author. I've read most of his latest novels, and this was just as good. It's shorter than most of his other books, and while bleak, he always creates interesting characters in compelling plots. Recommended.

Thanks very much for the ARC for review!!

So I think that's two novels Tchaikovsky has out in May, never mind the rest of the year. This is the fifth I've read from him – so approximately 2% of his output – and the closest to what was briefly called mundane SF; no far futures or distant worlds, no fiddling with the laws of physics as currently and commonly understood. Just a glimpse a few years into the future, which inevitably is not pretty. The rich are heading up the space elevators to orbital cruise liners, but this is a story of the poor bastards left at the bottom to keep operational the very same systems from which, as per bloody usual, they'll never see a benefit. Depending where they are, they have far too much water, or not nearly enough. Because of course around the equator, the best place to leave the planet, is also one of the first areas that's going to become uninhabitable, isn't it? And the story follows three brave, desperate 'firewalkers' out into the desertified badlands to investigate a problem with a solar farm, a journey with definite and deliberate overtones of a less humid but even deadlier Apocalypse Now. It's not a cheery read, in other words - although afterwards the news does seem comparatively less stressful, even if it's basically the prequel. I don't know that I altogether buy the final act, but until that it's a painfully likely glimpse into the crystal ball, which of course also serves to remind us of the degree to which we're already inhabiting a monstrous dystopia.

(Netgalley ARC)

On a scorched Earth, access to energy can mean the difference between life and death.

Firewalkers is the latest shorter novel by Tchaikovsky. A mystery set in an environmentally ravaged future, it follows a group of firewalkers as they are sent out to investigate some strange energy surges and interruptions. A bleak picture of the future, one in which the very few have left the many behind. I enjoyed this.

I don’t want to delve too deeply into the plot, as it’s not the longest of novels. (For Adrian, this can be classified as a novella…) We’re dropped right into the setting, and we quickly become oriented to this future. Temperatures have skyrocketed and world’s population is in a constant struggle for work, energy (mainly for air conditioning), food, and water. The wealthiest people alive are slowly disappearing up onto an orbital habitat, leaving the rest to scratch together an existence.

“Oil money, industry money, bottled water magnates, fossil fuel tycoons, and all the politicos who made sure they kept on fucking the world over. And then they get to live above it all and go someplace cool for the summer, like space. Because they’d rather throw their money at taking them and theirs to another planet than try to fix this one. And everyone left here? Well you can all fucking fry! Or you can take their dollars to fix their fucking AC before they grab it all and leave for good.”

That above quotation resonates so much with what we’re seeing today. Consider the number of billionaires who are spending vast sums on space travel, rather than fixing issues we have right here. There’s a quiet, fierce criticism of many contemporary policies in the book. Readers aren’t beaten around the head with them, but it’s also impossible to miss them (assuming you have eyes and ears and are vaguely aware of what’s happening in the world today).

An interesting novel that paints a grim picture of a possible future if global warming accelerates, and temperatures continue to rise dramatically. A diverse cast of interesting and distinct characters, a dollop of mystery and technological shenanigans. There’s some good action, tricksy AI, and a satisfying ending.

Recommended.

When you’re offered double-double danger pay to do a job with no other information, you know it’s not something you particularly want to do. But when you pause to consider this fact and the boss instantly ups the offer to double-triple … well. That’s a lot of money — and a whole lot of something to avoid — but if you live in a scorching, apocalyptic hellscape and your family depends on you for survival, literally, need trumps want. Every time.

Such is the thinking of Mao, one of the main characters in Firewalkers, an outstanding dystopian sci-fi thriller by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I was hooked from the very first page and tore through the book, reading in every spare moment and late into the night. This review is based on an advance copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley for that purpose. The book will be available on May 12, 2020.

Firewalkers is set in a climate-change devastated future, in a part of equatorial Africa where human survival relies on avoiding the daytime heat and sun. Mao and his friends Lupe and Hotep are Firewalkers, part of a select group of young men and women (Firewalkers don’t survive long enough to get old) who journey out into blasted wastes to repair the infrastructure keeping their boomtown settlement of Achouka scratching along.

Achouka exists in a land otherwise devoid of life because it is an anchor point, the terrestrial landing point for a cable to space. At the other end of that cable, a long elevator ride away, is a space ship where some of the planet’s most wealthy and powerful continue to live lives of comfort. Alongside the anchor point is a hotel where those lucky enough wait for their turn to ride the elevator to salvation. The great demand for power to keep these fortunate guests comfortably air conditioned is supplied by automated fields of solar panels connected to Achouka. When the power supply is disrupted just before a large group of guests is scheduled to arrive, Mao and his crew are sent Far South to locate and fix the problem.

Far South, where mysterious things are said to exist, and double-triple danger pay may not be enough.

I can’t say more without spoiling the fun for future readers. The pace is quick but not rushed, and the author does a great job of setting the scene without excess words. Mao and the other characters are well developed and interesting. There are some twists that took me by surprise, and some very thought-provoking ideas about inequality, the environment and family. While this doesn’t appear to be the opener of a series (and I’m not advocating for it to be), the ending is somewhat open-ended and I spent some time wondering what would happen next. There is a realistic uncertainty at the end of Firewalkers, and that made me enjoy it all the more.

This was a good story. Teams of Firewalkers go out in environmentally sealed buggies to work on jobs that only they can do - and many times, don't come back. You have a scorched earth, psychopathic holographs and lots of big bugs. Reminds me of a horror movie at a Saturday matinee with heavy ecological overtones. I gave it 5 stars because it is so well written.

Tchaikovsky creates an all too believable world here. Global warming has taken hold, and the rich have ascended into luxurious space stations, leaving the poor behind on a world of deserts, scarce resources, skin cancer and water shortages. This is the background for the adventure that unfolds when Mao, Lupe and Hotep take double-triple pay to head out into the desert to find out what's causing the power shortages.

What Tchaikovsky does brilliantly is capture different intelligences and give a real insight into what they might be like and what they might mean. He's good on how societies work, as well. This gives this book a real sense of being grounded, so that even when things get weird you can see how they got there.

Thank you to NetGalley for letting me read this ARC. I absolutely loved it.

This was a fun read. Fairly short, with a compelling story and good pacing, I read it in a single setting.

There was some "local" parlance that you have to sift through and decipher on your own, but I did not find that overly problematic.

Overall, I enjoyed it and with the minimal time required to read it I would freely recommend it to others. I would love to see this world revisited in future works.

SF or fantasy, Tchaikovsky is great always! Love his stuff! This is another great outing from him. Not to be missed.

I was provided a copy of Firewalkers through NetGalley in return for an honest review. This review has not been influenced in any way.

In Firewalkers, Aidrian Tchaikovsky has painted a painfully clear picture of the Earth's future as Climate Change has taken its toll. This story is fun, exciting, bleak and very real feeling. Tchaikovsky does a great job of building a world you can believe in a short amount of time.

The story follows a trio of Firewalkers, young and extremely talented, but not fortunate enough to escape the realities of their world. The trio is really well composed with some very classic fantasy/sci-fi personas, but also very unique to this story. Firewalkers are the disposable tools of the rich, and this story follows Mao, Hotep and Lupe as they embark on a mission to the most remote parts of South Africa, investigating a power failure affecting the rich in their home town.

Overall, this was fun and easy read.

Firewalkers follows a group of teens who venture out into the scoring hot desert to repair the centuries old solar farm. This solar farm powers the Roach Hotel and the surrounding towns. Without it life in this area would cease to exist.

The novel was dark, gritty and hellish as everyone struggles to survive while under the shadow of their potential salvation. The town and solar farm was build so an elite few could escape Earth by building and living on a space ship. The injustice that the world experiences was sad yet truthful. The rich destroy the planet while having the money to escape when they have too, while refusing to help their fellow human beings. The ending was great as it was such a perfect twist and a HEA all in one.

The characters were good but nothing ground breaking. I liked each character as they had their own struggles, history and strengths.

The pacing was good, since it is such a short novel (208 pages) there wasn't any slow parts.

Overall this was a great climate sci-fi dystopian novels that creates a perfect atmosphere. I would strongly suggest it to all fans.

Thanks to Netgalley and Solaris for the ARC.

I really enjoyed this fast-paced novella from the author, who brought us Children of Time. The group of main characters are several teenagers who have been summoned to provide services to the space community, since they are the last resort, young, and replaceable, and can accomplish things that robots cannot. They live in a world that’s connected to a space resort above their planet, and there is a huge disparity of lifestyles.

The author does a fantastic job of character development within this novella, and really makes the characters the focus of the story, and their roles within the greater story. They run into some crazy insects, a rogue AI and attempt to figure out what the hell is going on, and why they have been sent on this particular mission?

I recommend that science fiction fans read this title, and also suggest that public libraries purchase this title. I was able to get an advance copy of this from NetGalley and in return would provide a review.

I would like to thank Netgalley for providing me with an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review in return.

I'm just going to jump straight into this, I enjoyed this book, is it my favorite Sci-fi book out there no, but it was enjoyable and worked great for the short length. Scifi is a genre that I will admit I am still very new to, so at times there are moments when I don't particularly feel like I know what its going on. The first chapter of this book was honestly very confusing to me. I had to re-read parts a few times and I'm not entirely sure if it was an editing thing or just my mind not grasping what was being told. Once I got out of chapter 1 everything started to make sense, so don't be turned away if you run into the same feeling.

We are thrown into this post apocalyptic world, where the rich live in space and have everything they could ever desire and the poor are left back on Earth where its basically a giant dried up wasteland. And of course its the poor who make sure the rich keep getting to live their comfy lives up there in space, in hopes of one day getting to join them. Its a common theme for storytelling but I did enjoy it none the less.

In the initial meeting of the Firewalkers we are told they are a group of young adults, late teens who walk the burnt, dried up Earth when problems arise in their townships. Now when I initially read the ages of the characters I did my usual eye roll, because you know 19 year olds saving the day is just..... so realistic haha. But the thing that I liked that Tchaikovsky did with this, was he provided an excellent and thought out reason as to why a bunch of 19 year olds are the best choice for being Firewalkers. After it was explained I sat back and genuinely thought about the approach and agreed with the logic behind it.

The pacing of the storytelling, was wishy washy for me, some moments it was super interesting, others felt like I was trudging through mud, and others left me just confused (but that one is more of a personal issue with being new to sci-fi terminology so don't hold to much to that please)

The characters where alright, none of them really stood out to me, I didn't feel any strong connection to them, they were decently built and easy to follow along with, and I'm sure someone out there will enjoy their character types. Although at times the conversations they had felt hard to follow and understand because of the approach to the language that was taken. The story is obviously years in the future and language changes over time and I felt like I couldn't get a grasp on some of the terms or phrases that they used that were suppose to be considered normal for them.

The plot itself was entertaining once the story moved from the township to actually following the firewalkers out in the open. For me the storytelling really picked up about chapter 4 and beyond. The last half of the book, was exciting in terms of action but then the very tail end of the story just seemed to drop the momentum, the twists were good in my mind, maybe to the more experienced sci-fi reader it might be an obvious approach but for me it felt twisty and unexpected.

Overall, I really did enjoy the idea and it was executed well, For the most part I believe its an easy to follow plot, with decent likable characters, and good world building, with well executed ideals. A quick fun read for something to pass the time.

I first started reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's work with Children of Time. What I found is I really like his type of almost optimistic view of post apocalypse humanity. In Firewalkers he tells a story of those who left on Earth as it's dying.

Firewalkers is a good, if short, tale of how humanity struggles to survive as well as all the un-intended consequences to actions. Tchaikovsky works to quickly flesh out the characters and give a somewhat limited world view, which is all the main character knows about. As the story progresses, you get to feel like you know what is driving each character and that helps their decisions make sense.

I didn't give this book five stars because like I said, it's short. I do feel like the brevity of the book leads to a lack of identifying with how the general populace are acting towards the end of the book.

Overall it's a good book and I am hoping he's planning for a second story in this universe.

This is a brief and somewhat depressingly plausible morality tale set just before the end of the world, and its peppily picaresque adventure style ends up being a little at odds with is black as coal denouement. But that is the end of the world for you. And here we are in the hot zone. Regular tropes are set up for the start - a Space Elevator, on the equator, a climate ravaged society. In space the escape generation ship full of the rich arseholes, what's left of a support system eeking out a life of servitude on the ground floor. And that's where our firewalkers come in, trouble shooters sent out into the blistering desert to sort out broken solar arrays and have some world building adventures on the way.

And so off go our three firewalkers, with little more than broadly drawn personalities and background to play off what they find. And what they find initially challenges what felt like the hardish scientific underpinning of the book, and then unfolds into one of the older plots we can expect. That said the first two thirds are strongly picaresque, and the over theme or direction takes a long time to coalesce. This is not a problem, partially because two thirds of a short book is plenty of time to meander and do some solid world building. But it does mean that when we get to the psychological underpinnings of its denoument, it feels a little rushed, and the final deal struck is dodgy at best. Tchaikovsky likes burning through ideas in the other books i have read of his, and there is definately a case here where the characters are never quite as fleshed out as I would like. But it is a hugely enjoyable read for all of that, and I just wonder that it might have a bit more impact if the moral dilemma presented so reasonably at the end could have been given a little more weight if the audience was also allowed to participate in it.

(Netgalley ARC)

I did struggle to engage at first, possibly due to reading a credible post-apocalyptic wasteland during a pandemic. Once I settled in with the characters on their journey, I did find myself more engaged.

I like the premise, these firewalkers off out to explore their inhospitable surroundings, all while others disappear offworld to safety. It’s a short book that moves at a good pace. It does feel like it could’ve stood with a little more depth during the conclusion which is why I dropped a star.

This is one of the best works of dystopian fiction which I have read in the past year. The author does an amazing job of drawing the reader into the world that the characters inhabit. Besides providing the thrill and entertainment value of a well written work of fiction, the author does a great job of making readers think about the world we inhabit and are creating.

for those new to the genre, do not feel overwhelmed and or deterred. this book has everything i wanted and more. as someone who is relatively picky when it comes t0 SFF, i had no problem sinking into this universe and enjoying all it had to give.
for fans of andy weir especially, you will LOVE this

Firewalkers is an upcoming SF novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky scheduled to be released on May 12 - I received a prerelease e-Advance Reader Copy (e-ARC) from its publisher in exchange for a possible review. It's not a short novella - it's listed at 185 pages on Kindle and perhaps more importantly, it's not a novel that reads quickly either.

What it is however is a post-global warming - I hate to say post apocalyptic but you could go with that too - novel featuring a world in which the rich and powerful have left Earth onto spaceships orbiting the planet and a trio of young people left behind on Earth desperately scrapping for whatever they can get to feed themselves and their families. Needless to say class issues feature prominently in this SciFi thriller, and the book manages to weave them effectively through it all to form a really strong whole.


Quick Plot Summary: Global Warming has made the world mostly uninhabitable, and the areas around the equator should be too hot for the "mostly." But the rich needed those areas to build their space elevators so they could get to their escape ships, so small towns - the Anchors - of struggling workers moved to those wastelands anyhow, desperate for work.

Mao is a Firewalker, one of the young people who is willing to do the dangerous jobs out in the wastelands that lie just beyond the Anchors for money. So when he gets an incredibly well paying job to figure out why there are power shortages coming from solar panels set up out there, he and his two compatriots - tech savvy genius Lupe and exile from the rich space ship Hotep - set out to make the impossible and dangerous journey. But what they find out there will change everything....or will if they survive it all and manage to come back.....


Thoughts: Firewalkers is for the most part really effective at merging its two genres - a mad max-esque thriller as our heroes try to get from their home to the solar panels and figure out what's happening in the wasteland, only to find things and people in shapes they couldn't have imagined; and a class struggle in which the rich literally drive in fancy cars into a rich hotel, throwing out money to the poors along the way, as they then leave the hotel to go to space where they can never see the poors again. Without spoiling much, these two plot types fit together seemlessly (I mean they sort of did in Mad Max too, so perhaps that's not a surprise) and come back to prime importance by the plot's ending.

This is helped by not only the interesting setting but by the three characters all being really interesting for the most part: you have Mao, the desperate leader who knows mainly how to push forward to survive no matter what; you have Lupe, the tech genius girl who is cynical about the whole world and situation; and you have Hotep, perhaps the most interesting, who was on the rich space ship but exiled back to Earth for not fitting in and is desperately angry about it. They each have their strengths and weaknesses that for the most part work and make them fascinating and surprising - although Mao's moment of weakness is the weakest part of this whole novel, as it doesn't really match the rest of his character at all - and makes the plot compelling from beginning to end. And a surprise twist character's argument comparing a trope to not being any different from how the world really is is the most pleasant and interesting surprise of all, leading to a really satisfying conclusion in the end.



Strongly recommended.

Tchaikovsky is one of the most inventive and exciting sff authors writing today, and writing at a rate that boggles the mind. Another gripping story with real depth and interesting ideas. I just wish it had been longer.

What I like about Adrian Tchaikovsky is that whilst he solely writes sci-fi, he has a wealth of ideas to work with. I have read quite a few novels and short stories by him now, and I appreciate how he takes an idea and runs with it.

Like many people, I am all too aware of how delicate our world is, and I feel it is important that novels such as this are written and published. The theme of climate change is one touched upon in many of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novels, and the premise of firewalkers is very metaphorical. Those that have destroyed the Earth are now trying to leave it, leaving behind the younger generation who will have to live with their decisions.

I very much look forward to May when this story is released.

Firewalkers is a stand alone sci-fi novella from Adrian Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky has written some of the most fascinating and imaginative stories I’ve read in the last few years, and that trend has continued here.

This is a story of an Earth which is slowly becoming less and less habitable. The equator is becoming a desert, the heat of the sun during the day no longer survivable. People are migrating north and south, toward the coasts, toward lives of desperation, armed compounds, and survival. Well, most people are. For the super-rich, for those with the will and the resources, there’s another option. The rich have their own starships. These are being built, in theory, to save some remnant of humanity from climate catastrophe. Practically, they’re the playground of oligarchs, accessible only by space elevators scattered across the equator. Nobody goes up without an invitation, and while a lot fo resources go up the elevators, not a lot comes back down again.

Around the elevators, the gates to an unseen world of privilege, towns have sprawled, dedicated to fulfilling the needs of those who haven’t yet made their way up the elevator. People are crammed cheek-by-jowl, searching for patches of shade in the day, eyeing the slow disintegration of their society and their dignity each night, as the desert gets closer, and hotter, and the number of jobs goes down.

It’s a harsh world, yes, but there are wonders. The ships themselves are fantastic, of course, but there are other things out in the deep desert, where those now up the elevator spent their youth in secret research labs, building the technologies that would save them. There are rumours of botched biological experiments, of stashes of forgotten riches, of rogue computers taking over facilities, of research vaults that could make you rich, if you could find them. And the infrastructure, the power which ran those labs, now runs the cut down shanty towns around the elevator whisking the privileged away.

That’s where the Firewalkers come in. Sometimes, things break. Or things need retrieving from the deep desert, no questions asked. Firewalkers will drive days through killing sun, into unmapped geography, and face the monsters - for a price.

Our crew is Mao, and Lupé, and Hotep. The muscle, the mechanic, the tech wizard, teenagers taking a horrifying risk for the promise of just a little more money, just a little more medicine, just a little more hope. The story stands by Mao, a boy growing into a man, deciding who he’s going to be, and whether he’s ready to keep taking risks, keep walking into the fire. It’s a wonderful portrayal of someone fumbling for answers, driven by their confidence and confusion, struggling to keep making things right. The two women, Lupé, and Hotep are wonderfully realised themselves. Hotep is damaged, cutting, and surprisingly fragile, wrapped in bandages both concrete and metaphorical, trying to live out a life wrapped in rage and hurt and betrayal. Lupé is pragmatic, generally more phlegmatic, with moments of fire and a sense of the burden of responsibility. The three of them are chaos, a team working well together, with an abiding friendship disguised under an atmosphere of mercantilism. You can see them all, out there in the broken-down dustrunner that they use to hurl themselves into the teeth of danger, striding through the ruins and secrets of a shattered world, risking their lives, but not heroes - just people, with all the fragility, the hard edges and quiet looks that make them feel real.

And they’re on an adventure, for sure. I won’t spoil it, but there’s so much cool stuff here. The climate crisis and the concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite are front and centre here, explored with a precision and passion which makes for searing, unforgettable reading. It’s linked to some fabulous characterisation, and more personal stories, which help shape their world. Of course, if you’re here for the delving into shattered datavaults looking for remnants of a world long gone, whilst dodging sec-bots and horrifying abandoned experiments, it’s here too. This is a great story; it has a lot to say, and wraps its larger themes in a compelling narrative that kept me reading all night, even as I didn’t want it to end.


This is great stuff, and you really should read it.

Don't believe it's possible for fiction to be enthralling whilst also addressing urgent topical issues? Then let Mr Tchaikovsky prove you wrong in Firewalkers. Not only does it explore the links between class and climate change but it discusses capitalism and its issues, the vastly different lives of the rich and impoverished and the often brutal unfairness of life, all within the context of this compulsive standalone science fiction novella. Earth is now a post-apocalyptic wasteland due to significant climate change whereby the sun has scorched the planet almost turning it to desert and the wealthy have managed to use their money to build spaceships on which to leave a destroyed Earth behind to linger someplace more inhabitable. Of course, those with little to their name bear the brunt of it all and haven’t the means to keep their families fed and clothed never mind being able to afford the luxury of simply upping sticks and leaving it all behind. They live in the hope that one day they'll be able to join those who are more fortunate.

It follows Firewalkers Mao, Lupe and Hotep, a group of youngsters who are sent to repair vital infrastructure or retrieve items from the searing hot desert when necessary. Their employment is secured by promises of money, food, water and medicine, fuelling their hope that they will be able to leave soon too. This is a superb and exhilarating read right from the beginning and has both a stellar plot and impressive characterisation; it's what we've come to expect from Tchaikovsky and he never seems to let us down. Surprisingly for a novella, the cast is well fleshed out and come alive on the pages. It's a captivating, disturbingly bleak and all too real tale and one that cuts very close to the bone in that it captures impeccably how we are at a crossroads where we must make a decision as humans for the good of humanity whether we simply carry on in the way we have been or change our ways to save our planet. A sophisticated and thought-provoking piece. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Solaris for an ARC.

This was my second Tchaikovsky novella, the first was Small Things which I loved, so I went into this read with excitement. Then the pandemic hit and I work in the medical field so things go put off for a bit. I had some down time to curl up with a book recently and a novella was exactly what I needed. The rich destroy a planet and the poor work to keep it and themselves together. No this was in the book, not in real life. The characters were rich and well developed which is not something you always see in a shorter book. The pacing was excellent and the plot twist was superb. I really enjoyed this read and I appreciated the opportunity to review it.

In a not-so-distant future, the Earth has become a scorched hell zone. The very rich have escaped to orbiting habitats, accessed by space elevators. At the base of each, service townships (Ankara – not the Turkish capital, to save you my confusion!) have sprung up, populated by the likes of Mao. Mao is a young Firewalker – someone who will head out to the sunstruck wastes to fix the solar panels and tech that keeps the Ankara viable. It’s a deadly job, but when his other option was facing the bugs of the protein farm…

Adrian Tchaikovsky has a thing for bugs, as his previous works have shown – slight trigger warning for that, I suppose, but I loathe wriggly things and coped just fine.

In this novella, he manages to create a highly believable world, a set of intriguing characters, and switch direction at least twice. The pace is almost a little too much, but it certainly keeps the interest! I did wonder if the use of slang and dialect was going to be irritating, but very quickly I settled into it and it adds plenty of atmosphere – another way to create this world in a truncated way.

Mao pulls in a couple of skilled friends to head out to discover why the power to the township is failing. We get a sense of their lives, the new ‘world order’, and the results of a couple of hundred years of continued climate change. The timing is so coincidental: young people heading into life-threatening danger, the only way they can scrape a living, to save the privileges of the super-rich.

I won’t spoil the huge twist in direction, but it wasn’t what I was expecting! It wasn’t what the group were expecting to find in the middle of a barren desert, either…!

As I said, there’s a lot packed in to a fairly short tale. Well worth the read, and all too relevant for our times, in many ways… let’s hope we don’t head quite the same way, eh?!

This novella shines a light on to a dystopian future where climate change, capitalism and class have brutalised the human story on Earth. Mao, Lupe and Hotep are firewalkers, who repair and retrieve tech from the brutal equatorial desert to supply the Anchor, the base of the space elevator that takes those who can afford it and who fit the profile up to the waiting space liner. Given the task of figuring out why the power supply from the solar fields is browning out Mao & co. set off into the desert in a 'bug' which is barely up to carrying the three of them, keeping them cool (ish) and supplying them with water. They make some discoveries that pretty well change the way they see the world. The characters, particularly Mao, are well drawn. Mr. Tchaikovsky manages to wrap a gritty, gripping adventure into a piece that starkly outlines our own (current and future?) social problems. It's a quick read, but when it comes, the ending is fast, maybe too fast. This is a novella, but it could so easily have been a novel. The last chapter had enough to fill a book (and one I would be happy to read)..

Nguyēn Sun Mao is a firewalker, that is, a fixer who, with a trusted crew, will venture out into the withering heat of near future, global-heating afflicted tropical Africa to mend tech.

The little community he lives in - Ankara Achouka - owes its existence to a rich-person project to escape the heat and death. Ankara it, literally, the site of the Anchor (or one of them), the foot of a space elevator that serves the building starship Grand Celeste. Workers were gathered from around the world ('There'd been plenty out of Vietnam who'd needed somewhere that wasn't underwater right about them') to construct it, repopulating zones previously abandoned as the temperature rose.

Scattered around in the desiccated countryside are the abandoned villa estates of the monied who got together to fund escalator and starship, the labs and research stations where it was designed, and square kilometres of solar panels to power everything. It's all pretty much abandoned now as the last few passengers drive, stay briefly in Ankara and make their way to their berths. Mao and his ilk scratch out a bare living keeping those panels running to serve the hotel and town, and fixing this and that.

Of course, this book involves a trip out of town into the heat and into danger, a trip that will change things for ever...

Tchaikovsky packs a great deal into this short book. There's the closely observed relationship between Mao and his team - Lupé, who 'just liked the feel of the metal under her fingers', Hotep, 'the space girl', a young woman expelled from the Celeste because she didn't fit in ('She laughed at the wrong times, cried at the wrong things, took the wrong message from jokes,,,') - one of the elite, born, in her view, to be an astronaut, but now to be left behind, she's an ambiguous figure ('she had a right to be mad, maybe, but that didn't make her the avenging champion of the world either'), which is reflected in the way everyone around her behaves.

There are heartbreaking, truly fearful descriptions of the ruin of Earth, the dry river beds, dusty plains and long-gone animals and and trees (trees are now just something strange you see in old pictures- were they ever real?) The repellant, processed food. And, everywhere, the legacy of the rich who, rather than try to fix things, squandered resources on building themselves an escape route.

It is a really grim vision, but in these times of one rule for the powerful, one for the rest of us, it hardly takes much persuasion that these might be the consequences, this might come true.

There is, also, of course, a mystery driving events here. Just what's causing the power drops that Mao is sent out to fix? The job takes him and the team way, way out into the badlands, to areas rumour populates with the strange, dangerous relics of experiments, where possibly labs still run on auto, tampering with who knows what. Mao is chosen for having survived one nightmare trip already but this time he faces different challenges.

There is some beautiful (and clever!) writing here ('the libido faction in Mao's personal government tabled a motion', 'They were heading for the Heart of Brightness', a sun 'the head of a white hot rivet just driven in by some celestial smith'). I loved the way that Mao's, and his crew's, expectation of the ruined, abandoned villas they discover, and the civilisation they represented, is all mediated through popular dramas which themselves don't comprehend what they're portraying, or the grimly realistic cultural attitudes embedded in the text, exposed when Lupé finds a working mirror screen that, to flatter, smooths the blemishes from her skin - and renders it 'a good few shades lighter'.

While there's a SF core to the novel in its background of climate disaster, space travel and future tech, the events are all driven by the consequences of flawed humanity as we know it and can see it today. There's no redeeming hero trying to fix things, indeed from what we see of the powerful here they're all about to begin a scramble over each other for escape, leaving Mao and his like to wither in the heat.

Which is what makes it - despite the temperatures experienced by Mao and Co! - still a chilling read. It's a book I'd recommend, as temperature records fall and we hear talk of colonies on Mars which, I'm sure, won't be for you and me...