It’s not unheard of but rather uncommon that the same author writes science fiction and fantasy. Some write science fiction, some write fantasy — be it high or low fantasy — and some write a mix.
Adrian Tchaikovsky who is the author of the science fiction novels in the Children of Time world is also the author of the high fantasy trilogy “Echoes of the Fall”. You could accuse him of adding some science fictional elements in the third book “The Hyena and the Hawk”, but most of this one and the other two books are just pure fantasy with no crossover to science fiction.
One thing “Echoes of the Fall” has in common with “Children of Time” is the dominating role of animals. But while in “Children of Time” the animals are exalted to sentient species by human tampering, in “Echoes of the Fall” humans have animal souls.
A human with an animal soul can change into that kind of animal. Someone with a wolf soul can transform into a wolf and back again without any effort. This provides a great stage for nicely choreographed fights and fights there are many in this trilogy. Humans change to wolfs, tigers, hyenas, bears and many more while fighting to bite and hit their opponents and then change again to human form to use knives and swords against them.
As with most good fantasy stories there are mysteries, magics and gods.
In the first novel — The Tiger and the Wolf — the daughter of a wolf-man and a tiger-woman needs to decide which of her two souls — tiger or wolf — to keep and which to abandon.
The second novel — The Bear and the Serpent — presents a bigger conflict in which a brother and a sister fight against each other to gain the throne vacated by their dead father.
In the third and final novel — The Hyena and the Hawk — the whole world is threatened by an invasion of people without animal souls. This is the one where it looks like science fiction is creeping into the story as the soulless people are technologically advanced and seem to use advanced weapons like rifles and canons although those are never named that way.
Although humans changing into animals and back again or having some deeper relationships with animal counterparts isn’t something new in the fantasy genre, I liked this new take on that. I also like how the animal souls affect the characters of the humans. Wolf, tiger, hyena, serpent, crocodile and others cause interesting and fun traits in their humans.