(spoilers for the premises of various books)
Children of Time: What if spiders were sapient?
Children of Ruin: What if octopi were sapient?
Children of Ruin (again): What if slime mould were sapient?
Children of Memory: What if raven couples were sapient?
The Final Architecture: What if moons were sapient?
Dogs of War: What if networks of sapients were sapient?
Bear Head: What if Trump were sapient?
Also Children of Memory What if a character in a story a computer made up was sapient?
Not gonna lie, I loved them all.
Actually, I think Bear Head should be: What if Trump were non-sapient?
Supposedly, Thompson was all id, no ego.
Seriously though, Tchaikovsky’s burning question as an author seems to keep coming back to how far away from human intelligence can we get and still recognize the “I” behind the eyes?
Interestingly, to me at least, the entity he seems to come down on as being the most fundamentally alien to Humans is… sociopaths, which he explorers in Bear Head through a Trump-analogue politician. When I first started reading the book I was rolling my eyes a little, but I should have had more faith. It ended up being a chilling and thought-provoking exploration of how a certain class of humans are able to “hijack” social interactions as a shortcut to imposing their will over others.
He’s easily my favorite contemporary author.
He’s a favourite of mine as well. Have you read Cage of Souls? It breaks your sapience mold, and of his books I liked it best until he wrote The Final Architecture trilogy.
It’s almost fantasy-like in plot, but the world is shown through a lens of “lost technology” rather than “magic”.