I am tempted, in writing about Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ten-book, 6000+ page, nearly two million word series Shadows of the Apt, to be terse: read it.

But, like, that’s kind of a big ask, y’know? The series is 1.924 million words long. As a comparison, the Wheel of Time series is 4.36 million words. A Song of Ice and Fire is currently at 1.749 million, with two imaginary books left to go. James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series is 1.493 million words. The entire length of this blog: 1.563 million words. The King James Bible is around 785,000, depending on how you count and who you ask.

Oh, and there are apparently four volumes of short stories outside the main story? I just found out they existed, finding out they existed made me want to die, and I don’t know how much they add.

It’s a lot. And what fascinates me is that Shadows of the Apt has got to be the least well-known of all the big fantasy megaseries. Tchaikovsky writes seventeen books a year (he has, no joke, released five new books since I’ve been reading this series. I mean it. I’m not kidding.) and I don’t feel like the guy gets nearly enough credit for being as amazing as he is. Shadows was written between —

— you may want to sit down, as this is ridiculous —

— 2008 and 2014. All of those books came out in six years, and I’d bet money that he released books unrelated to SotA during that time, plus, remember, those four extra books.

I do not know a single other person who has read this series, and I never see anyone talking about it. I can’t explain this.

I picked up Empire in Black and Gold in October, and I finished Seal of the Worm earlier this week, obviously with a lot of detours. The series breaks down rather nicely into a four-book series, Empire through Salute the Dark, and I took a decent-size break in between that and picking up The Scarab Path. Path and Sea Watch feel pretty stand-alone, as they do a Two Towers sort of thing and don’t share a lot of characters, and then the last four books go in a big gulp, but they follow pretty closely on the events of Path and Sea Watch.

I haven’t said a single word about the actual fuckin’ story yet.

Adrian Tchaikovsky likes bugs. Outside of John Irving he may be the most “Oh, there it is” author I’ve ever read. Every John Irving book is going to include weird sex, an amputation, a bear, a hotel, and wrestling. Adrian Tchaikovsky books without bugs are rare. And in Shadows of the Apt, every character is a bug. Every single one.

Well. Sorta. The human race is divided into something called kinden, and each kinden has the characteristics of a type of bug, which somehow sounds weirder than it is. They’re all still human, mind you, and kinden can interbreed, but there are Beetle-kinden and Wasp-kinden and Mantis-kinden and … let’s see, spiders, flies, bees, ants, moths, mosquitoes, scorpions (there’s a reason I said “bug” and not “insect”), dragonflies, woodlice, and, uh, Mole Crickets.

I admit it, I burst out laughing the first time a Mole Cricket-kinden showed up in the book. That’s not an exhaustive list by any means, especially since a handful of the kinden are spoilers, and I never got the feeling that Tchaikovsky had sat down and written out an exhaustive list that he was never going to break away from. I’m pretty sure there’s a stick bug kinden in there somewhere that only gets mentioned a handful of times, and there’s exactly one butterfly-kinden in the entire series. I think if he got an idea for a character with a new kinden, he just put them in and rolled with it.

oh my god I just googled mole cricket for the first time oh my god OH MY GOD WHAT the FUCK

Anyway, most of the main characters are Beetles and Wasps, with a few significant Mantises and Spiders, but by the end of the series the list of characters is like eight pages long. Some kinden have, effectively, powers– Wasps have a sting that is basically a force blast they can shoot from their hands, several kinden can fly, and Ants are effectively a hive mind, and not all of them are completely human-shaped– Mole Crickets (brrrr) are ten feet tall, for example, and Mantis-kinden have some spiky bits that the rest don’t have. Some can see in the dark. Some can dig basically as fast as they can walk. You get the idea. There are cultural differences as well, although the series does take some pains to not be completely “orcs are like this, and elves are like that,” if you know what I mean. Spiders are gonna be Like That, but then he’ll throw a Spider at you that isn’t Like That, just to make sure you realize there’s diversity in the kinden.

So yeah, the first four books are the Wasps basically trying to take over the world. That war ends in book four. In the back six they basically consolidate what they lost in the first war and then try again, and the entire tenth book is a spoiler. The big problem with maxiseries like this is that there can be a lot of filler– I will never get tired of pointing out that the entire second book of The Wheel of Time could be a ten-page prologue to book three without losing anything– and it’s amazing how well this series keeps the plot moving. If anything, I felt like Book Ten could be broken into two books with another 300 pages and I’d have been fine with it, as some of the developments in that book feel like they come kind of out of left field. The flabbiest part of the series is The Sea Watch, which is the only book that’s remotely skippable, and even that one is stuffed full of tons of crazy cool ideas. It’s just that they don’t pay off sufficiently in subsequent books, which is part of why I feel like Seal of the Worm could be two books.

The different kinden are broken into two categories, the Apt and the Inapt. Apt kinden can use technology, and the work various groups of Apt artificers do over the course of the series to forge new ways to kill each other is genuinely impressive. Inapt kinden simply cannot use technology, and I’ll admit that figuring out what this exactly meant was one of my few complaints about the series. What is meant by that is that you can literally hand a crossbow, powered by a trigger, to an Inapt Mantis-kinden and they will be unable to figure out that pulling the trigger will shoot the thing. Most of the races that have major characters are Apt, and you don’t really get into the head of an Inapt character until really late, so it takes a while for it to sink in that Tchaikovsky really means it when he says at one point that if a door is opened by a button, an Inapt character will not be able to figure out how to open that door or understand how it works even if someone else shows them. Ultimately, this is a fantasy series, with swords and armor and such, but the artificers and the Apt kinden give a nice soupçon of science fiction to go with it.

(Yes, I wrote that sentence just so I could say soupçon.)

There is also magic, but … Christ, that’s a whole thing, and it’s practically a spoiler just to say that, but let’s say that the back part of the series is more about magic and the Apt vs the Inapt than the first part is, where that distinction is really in the background.

So much for being terse.

Please read this series. Come back in two years and let me know when you’re done. I need someone to talk to about it.