And his love for anthropods (as seen in his Shadows of the Apt series) is not diminished! So it’s not all about dogs, and even not all about so-called Bioforms, because Rex’s story is interspersed with different forms of humans and monsters from the beginning. Adrian Tchaikovsky does a brilliant job in giving them personality, sometimes with very little material to work with. And I loved the other animal characters, too – Honey, Dragon, and Bees. I wanted Rex to succeed in overcoming the simple truths he harbors to shield himself from a world that is far more complicated. Rex has a complicated (or is it, really?) relationship with his ruthless human master, and his journey into a more sophisticated way of thinking echoes Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon quite a bit.Īs the story unfolds, it turns out to be a real page-turner, too. He’s a dog, one nightmare of a dog, full of all the loyalties, limited forms of understanding, and teeth dogs usually come with. And one of the most heartbreaking moments happens when Rex, the augmented/uplifted canine and central pov character, begins to suspect this. They are built to be terrible, alien, horror-inducing. That is Master’s joke.ĭogs of War is a near-future sf novel about modified animals used as forces of destruction in asymmetric, engineered wars.
And I knew from the first sentence I’d love it and it would break my heart. I like stories focusing on animals, I’m up for the occasional well-written military SF, and I’ve enjoyed all of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novels I read, so Dogs of War was an insta-buy for me. Dogs come with more loyalty and trust than any single human should be allowed to handle, and thus stories about dogs are prone to enter the bitter space of betrayal, in some way or the other, unless you’re going for a trick ending like Richard Adams’ The Plague Dogs.
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