The Hungry Gods by Adrian Tchaikovsky Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction
Series: Terrible Worlds
Pages: 176
Published by Solaris on August 12, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
The Gods have returned to the world.
Amri was a Rabbit, one of a tribe of survivors scratching out an existence in the blasted landscape of a shattered, poisoned world. The Seagull fight, the Pigeon trade and the Cockroach scavenge, but the Rabbit had one rule: If you want to see tomorrow, you run.
But they didn’t run fast enough when a weapon fell from the sky and consumed their home, and now Amri is alone, in the company of a fallen god named Guy Vesten. A god who promises revenge against the three gods who turned against him, and who killed her tribe.
But gods don’t kill easily. Guy will need followers, like any god, and warriors to aid him in his quest. And if Amri is to find a place in the world that is to come, she may as well be standing at his right hand, as his priestess…
My Review:
They are the leftovers. They may look like dregs, but what they are are survivors. They’re what’s left of humanity generations after the climate apocalypse turned runaway and poisonous, after Earth’s self-described best and brightest fucked off to create utopia somewhere else because their home planet was simply too far gone.
Which means that Amri has spent her life doing what the gods themselves did. She runs. And she survives because she runs. Not that she knows that – at least not yet.
But that utopia wasn’t all it was cracked up to be – or wasn’t as self-sustaining as they believed it would be. Or their visions weren’t quite enough after all.
Perhaps all of the above. Not that Amri knows that either.
What Amri does know is that the self-proclaimed gods have returned to Earth in a rain of fire – or at least that’s the story that one of those gods, Guy Vestren, claims. Then again, Guy claims to be the one good god, the only one of the gods who intends to raise what’s left of humanity alongside him.
So that he has cannon fodder to throw at his fellow gods – the ones who are not good. Or at least not good for humanity – according to Guy. Bruce Mayall wants to cover the world in plants, Matthias Fabrey wants to cover the world in ants, and Padreig Gramm just wants to watch automatons play at being human because humans are much too messy. (He’s not wrong about that last bit as humans are what got the world into this mess in the first, long ago, place)
But Amri is a survivor, and so are what remains of the rest of humanity. They’ve been tempered, generation after generation, on a forge that Guy and his fellow gods can’t even begin to imagine. They’re all too focused on each other to see what’s happening at their feet.
Amri and her people don’t need gods. What they need is a chance. And the gods have provided the biggest one of those they’ll ever have on this blasted heath of a world. All they have to do is reach out and take it.
And run with it.
Escape Rating B+: I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into when I picked this one up. I’ll fully confess that I grabbed it because it was short, and because the author was top of mind because his work is all over this year’s Hugo Ballot. (As much as I want to dive back into the Tyrant Philosophers, that series is nearly all doorstops)
I got two things that I was not expecting at all. I wasn’t expecting this novella to be part of a loosely connected series, but not only is it part of the author’s Terrible Worlds series, I’ve read bits of the series (Ogres, One Day All This Will Be Yours, And Put Away Childish Things) without realizing they were even loosely part of the same thing.
And I really wasn’t expecting how much the story in The Hungry Gods resembles the plot of the videogame Horizon Forbidden West. But it seriously does, which meant that I did know where the story was going long before it got there.
Even though it did start in a burned out world that was a lot more like Premee Mohamed’s Annual Migration of Clouds series. Meaning a blasted Earth suffering from a runaway climate apocalypse while humanity clings to survival wherever and however they can even though their environment is killing them.
What made The Hungry Gods work, what made all of the above listed stories work and maintained the reader’s interest, is, of course, the characters. In the case of The Hungry Gods, it’s not the gods that keep the reader turning pages, it’s Amri and her fellow survivors.
The people that Guy believes are his worshippers, but are, in fact, following Amri – even if they don’t know it yet. Or possibly even if they do.
Because Amri is the one who matters. Not because she’s necessarily anything all that special, and she’s certainly never thought of herself as such. But because her whole life has been about squeezing another day out of nothing at all. She sees Guy for the human he is underneath the powerful armor and high-tech toys, and she’s prepared for him to cheat her and all her people at the first opportunity.
Because that’s what humans do. And she’s had way more practice at being merely and only human than the ‘good god’ Guy Vestren will EVER have.
The ending turned out to be both chilling and righteous, and a good reading time was absolutely had by all. Except the gods.
Now that I know this is sorta/kinda a series, I’m going to have to get the ones I haven’t read (Ironclads, Firewalkers, Walking to Aldebaran and Saturation Point) for the next occasions when I need a short, punchy, reading pick-me-up!
