The novella “Firewalkers” by Adrian Tchaikovsky was published for the first time in 2020. In 2023, it was published as part of the anthology “Terrible Worlds: Revolutions” as well.
In the African desert, the Firewalkers are tasked with maintaining the facilities that operate the space elevator that takes people into orbit. When a problem arises with the power grid, Mao, Lupé, and Hotep set out to look for the fault.
In an area where conditions are unsuitable for human survival, the three Firewalkers find a house. They discover that Bastien Fontaine, who had worked on the systems of the spaceship where the rich live, and his family live there. However, not everything is as it seems.
“Firewalkers” takes us to a not-so-distant future that is in some ways very different from the present, but at the same time easily understandable because it represents the projection of current negative trends. Climate change is making Earth uninhabitable for humans, so the rich have gone to live in orbit, leaving everyone else to try to survive in conditions that are difficult, to say the least.
Adrian Tchaikovsky focuses on the situation in the area where a space elevator still connects the rich people’s space habitat to Earth. Through the difficult work of three Firewalkers, he develops a story that can be classified as climate science fiction, yet has strong social elements, not to mention technological ones. For a novella-length story, there’s a lot going on!
In that future, the rich can literally look down on everyone else. They’re the only ones who can afford technologies like space habitats or artificial intelligence. They’re also the ones who reduced the world to that state and then left the rest to boil, again quite literally.
The description of that elite shows their absolute selfishness, as if belonging to it meant losing one’s humanity. An artificial habitat seems truly suited to such people. The inclusion of artificial intelligence allows for a comparison that shows how humans can be much more dangerous than any artificial construct when they pursue only their own self-interest.
What seems like a routine repair job ends up becoming something very different. The stories of Mao, Lupé, and Hotep, whose personalities emerge in many ways, show different sides of a future that seems hopeless for the people who can’t afford to live in orbit.
The protagonists risk their lives every day to earn the bare minimum needed to survive in increasingly difficult conditions. Surely, the aristocrats of the future claim that people like those Firewalkers are lucky to have a job and that the best workers have the opportunity to become rich. The reality is harsh and brutally depicted, just like the developments of the discoveries made by the three Firewalkers.
All this makes “Firewalkers” a novella in which Adrian Tchaikovsky is merciless in describing what already today appears to be a sort of neo-feudalism. In the future, this is stressed by the fact that the aristocrats take refuge in a sort of hyper-technological castle, leaving common people to fend for themselves. It’s a dystopia, but it’s also an absolutely brutal projection of certain current trends. You can find the anthology “Terrible Worlds: Revolutions” on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
