2026 Book Review #34 – Saturation Point by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My library has a surprisingly large (if oddly distributed) collection of Tchaikovsky’s back catalogue, and I picked this off of it mostly because of the striking cover art. It’s perfectly technically competent, because Tchaikovsky can probably write one of these in his sleep by now. It is, however, definitely one of his weaker offerings – little more than a couple ideas that would have been better suited to a short story than a novella, and a return to some of his favourite themes and plot beats in a way that left me painfully aware I’d already read him doing the same thing but better.
Set in a bleak corporate dystopia wracked by extreme climate change and waves of ever-worsening plagues, the story follows Dr. Jasmine Marks. A biologist whose career has stalled out rather badly, she is rescued from another twenty years of helping to develop newer and more patented breeds of blight-resistant rice by the ghost of the only exciting work she ever did. As a bright-eyed research assistant, she had been part of the last expedition into the Zone – an area climate change has rendered too hot and humid for humans to survive in for more than an hour without a full, battery-powered enviro-suit. Now, hired under blatantly false pretenses by an absurdly suspicious executive, she is brought along as the local subject matter expert on a heavily armed team whose actual objective she only realizes when it’s far, far too late to back out.
So the phrase this whole book is built around is ‘wet-bulb temperature’. Tchaikovsky was clearly deeply fascinated by just how fast you can die when it’s both too hot and too humid to cool yourself via evaporating sweat. Because he’s himself, the book is also very interested in what sort of life would thrive in such conditions in the decades after humanity has either evacuated or started rotting on the ground. Both interesting ideas, though spread a bit thin by the amount of time spent dwelling upon them.
The idea of The Zone – the area that is utterly deadly and inhospitable to humanity in eerie and uncanny ways, but simultaneously verdant and overflowing with strange natural beauty – isn’t a new one. Tchaikovsky doesn’t even pretend it is – several classic pieces of sci-fi with similar themes are explicitly name-checked by different characters while they talk about it. The book is easily at its best when it tries to approach the idea in a semi-grounded and realistic way, more Chernobyl Exclusion Zone than Area X. The facsimile of realism in the descriptions of the primeval-seeming but fundamentally new and rapidly developing biomes emerging out of the land that humanity has made lethal to itself was the most compelling part of the book by some margin.
In a similar vein, the thinly sketched civilization the expedition leaves behind is far more interesting to me than another Day After Tomorrow-style environmental apocalypse. A post-industrial civilization that just continues to muddle through and more-or-less adapt as things get worse and worse around it rings far truer to me these days, I suppose.
All of which is to say the book more or less had me until the turn of the third act when all the shocking reveals started (‘or less’ because most of those reveals were pretty painfully obviously several chapters before the book actually got around to them). The jungle-dwelling transhumans just shattered past the point my suspension of disbelief had previously been holding, and not to the story’s benefit – especially because they come across less as interesting speculative biology than spooky superhuman movie monsters with a bit of technobabble behind them.
Once they’re properly introduced, the story proceeds exactly as you’d expect, and with the same themes more or less every other sci-fi story Tchaikovsky has ever written about a shitty human civilization encountering the Alien. Which might be less tiresome for me if I hadn’t already read so many of them, but I have so it made for slightly tedious reading.
Marks as a protagonist doesn’t help with this, honestly. It’s a staple of horror stories to have a protagonist who knows fuck and all and politely takes a chapter longer than the average reader to put any two points together, but crucially those stories are usually half as long as this was. She exists in the narrative as a witness and a piece of dead weight lugged around by various parties with agency – I’m not sure she ever actually does anything of import on her own initiative across the entire story? When the story would have probably felt a bit slow and meandering regardless, this is almost excruciating, and pads the book out much longer than it needed to be. Most of the other characters are more competent, but few of them are very compelling or have more than a few notes to them – the original Annihilation isn’t that much longer than this, and manages to have a far more fleshed out and compelling cast.
It’s not an especially awful book, or anything. But it would have been better served as a short story, and grabbing any of Tchaikovsky’s other books at random will probably get you something better than this to read instead.
