Why read the Shadows of the Apt series by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Shadows of the Apt is a 10-book series written by Adrian Tchaikovsky. An author who impressed me with Guns of the Dawn (one of the rare stand alone fantasy stories and it is an overall well rounded book, exploring a few interesting themes, like women in the army, warfare and a clever young woman having to find her way in a male dominated society).

The books that belong to the Shadow of the Apt series are the following: Empire in Black and Gold, Dragonfly Falling, Blood of the Mantis, Salute the Dark, The Scarab Path, The Sea Watch, Heirs of the Blade, The Air War, War Master’s Gate and Seal of the Worm.

While, in full transparency, I have not finished the series (and it is a soft goal I have for 2023, although I have way too many goals at this point and I wish I could achieve all of them, although unrealistic), I have loved everything I read so far (I got to book seven).

So why do I love this series?

First and foremost, world building. Adrian Tchaikovsky took an interesting concept and delivered a wonderful world. What if human had insect traits? How would a human with beetle traits look like? A bit chubby, clever and taking into account the future? What about a human with spider traits? And with wasp traits?

Well all of these questions - and more - are addressed in the book. And that is what I love the most about this story; there are essentially a few different races (and a few is a understatement), and there is clash between different cultures taking place in this long story. In fact, this is one of the elements that push the story forward: what happens when an empire is slowly but consistently taking over the world and few see this almost unstoppable advance as a risk? What if these few see this menace and work to stop it?

Well this is exactly how this story starts.

What else works here? Well, there are traditional fantasy elements, like magic and a clever twists to it; races or people who can use magic usually are incapable of using the mechanical advancements (and vice-versa). And this leads to the other element that I like (and I came to realize this is something I crave only recently), there are steampunk elements to this story; it is not the main part of the story but it is certainly something that informs many decisions and challenges in the story. Just to understand how cool this element is in the story, there are air ships! Actual airship carrying passengers around from point A to point B.

Truly, what I loved about this series (so far at least) is to slowly uncover the abilities of each race, how they all interact (socially and culturally), what are the political (international policy really) interactions between different races and what are the goals for each city or reign. This discovery process was a lot of fun and I have waited a long time to re-read it so I can re-discover the entire world from scratch one more time (without remembering much about it!).

The plot is also quite interesting; as I said, the conflict (and the whole story really) is driven by international politics and war. I always wonder what regime inspired the Empire of the wasps (I keep thinking Roman Empire but it is also not accurate, since the Romans tended to implement a lot of the local beliefs into their culture; this was oddly inclusive but it was a strategy of the Roman Empire to ensure they could keep growing without too many issues long term; so it might have been the Huns? I don’t know but I like to keep guessing - do you know what inspired the Wasp empire? Comment down below).

I also found the characters quite compelling; some more interesting to me than others - very subjective approach here, as I feel some characters make choices that I would have probably made too. And this is what I like here; there is probably a character for everyone to fall in love with and the need to know what happens to them. Essentially to root for them!

Have you read The Shadow of the Apt? If so, what is your favorite character or your favorite race? You can comment down below with the emoji of your favorite race! If you did not read this series yet and you did not have it on you radar, will you include it on your TBR? If you already included it in your TBR, why?