This is what world building means....

Great worldbuilding by the master.
At first, the prison setup wasn't a fan of, but then, with new scenes, world events and characters, I just couldn't wait to find out more till the end.

‘Cage of Souls’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a brilliant work of science fiction world-building! It takes place in the future near the end of the life of Earth’s sun (maybe a billion more years or less left) and only small isolated pockets of the human race exist (only one major city, Shadrapar, is left, with about 100,000 people).

Whether people are from the wealthy and powerful upper-classes or if they are surviving as members in the gangs of the Underground, it is mostly a scavenger economy. Almost no one knows how to replace or fix the high-tech technology developed in the past. A lot of the tech developed from millennia ago that is failing is beginning to seem like magic, especially communications. Technological innovation is being undertaken solely by the few secretive crackpots and unstable geniuses still walking about. Reading and writing is disappearing as a skill of the masses - only academics and some of the wealthy still can read and write.

Global warming and radiation levels are at the upper scales of tolerability for human life. Life has become cheap. Political power and wealth is a deadly game of mostly aggressive men and some women. The only future is that of each individual’s lifespan since the human race as a whole is beyond hope of survival, having fallen to levels of unsustainability. People appear to repress their better natures of wanting to help each other generally except for a few progressive political types attending the Academy and for regressive working-class unions upholding the principles of communism. Friendships are undertaken cautiously since it's a dog-eat-dog society. Anyone who dares express any opinion of innovation or evolution still being possible to save humanity is not welcome in Shadrapar. Shadrapar is a city of decadent elites, more interested in partying on and maintaining the status quo, and the people who sustain them. Anyone of any class who displeases the narcissistic elites are immediately arrested by a security group called The Angels (because of equipment they wear) and sent to a prison upriver from Shadrapar.

The prison is a floating island which floats because of machines. No one knows how the machines work, but they have one prisoner (only one!) who understands enough how to maintain them. The island is surrounded by a marshy jungle. There are fearful and deadly creatures everywhere in the river and the marsh. No one attempts to explore the river or marsh except in some mining boats manned by prisoners under guard by wardens. The prisoners exist to mine chemicals from the waters of the marsh, which are shipped to Shadrapar. The prison is run by a man called The Marshal, but there is an elite called The Governor who is nominally in charge. The Marshal is a homicidal psychopath. The Governor is waiting to be forgiven for whatever sin he committed which caused him to be sent to the prison supposedly as its manager. He doesn’t care about the prisoners or the prison, only about his own interests in astronomy and a famous book written by a scientist about animals, called a bestiary, which he can’t read because it's in a language taught in the past.

The narrator, Stefan Advani, has been sent to the prison in the opening chapters of the novel. Since he is a non-athletic, non-heroic young academic, he is scared to death! His crime is that he belonged to an intellectual group interested in telepathic evolution. He had no idea belonging to the group of intellectuals would get him imprisoned! He had had to go Underground for awhile, which he describes in later parts of his memoir. He gets quite an education in discovery of what is left of humanity! And so do we, gentle reader.

As usual with an AT novel, he takes his time in exploring briefly a lot of extrapolated social and technological niches and byways, cultural history, and social customs in his books. These sociology explorations are never info dumps imho, but are shown to readers during the telling of the story. Given AT’s apparent preferences in what to write about in every book I’ve read by him, I am not surprised his main character and narrator in this novel is a social historian! But readers who want more action and continuous focus on a goal might be frustrated by an AT novel, full stop. Also, he tends to invent characters with a lot of blind spots and faults for which they pay dearly - you know, like people in real life.

AT seems to find tremendous satisfaction in the creation of societies populated by evolved and DNA-manipulated creatures of all sorts, and then next to drive the story through conflicts the creatures have in competing for resources. The creatures, whether human, or experimental humans, or animals, all tend to be shortsighted and self-involved no matter how much they are physically evolved, all more interested in their personal survival or interests than noble political pursuits, again, as I mentioned earlier, like in real life. Heroics are an accident, usually, but it happens. So a Tchaikovsky novel is more of a combined travelogue/memoir and a historical document written by characters billions of years in the future looking at their society with a perhaps slightly negative sociological point of view. Not everyone will like his speculative works of science fiction, but maybe fans of H.G. Wells would enjoy a Tchaikovsky novel the best. I really enjoyed this book!

man. this was bleak despite itself. that's the bang that causes the whimper, folks. kept me hooked the entire time, though, and i am BEGGING for more worldbuilding because i will be thinking about this for a hot second.

4.5/5 rounded up