Book Review: Children of Memory, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The third book in the Children of Time series.
Tor Books, 2023, 480 pages
The modern classic of space opera that began with Children of Time continues in this extraordinary novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.
Earth failed. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, Heorest Holt, carried its precious human cargo to a potential new paradise. Generations later, this fragile colony has managed to survive, eking out a hardy existence. Yet life is tough, and much technological knowledge has been lost.
Then strangers appear. They possess unparalleled knowledge and thrilling technology-and they've arrived from another world to help humanity’s colonies. But not all is as it seems, and the price of the strangers' help may be the colony itself.
Children of Memory by Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky is a far-reaching space opera spanning generations, species and galaxies.
This is the third book in the Children of Time series, Adrian Tchaikovsky's space opera about uplifted species and terraformed worlds.
Since Children of Time, a recurring character has been Avrana Kern, the scientist who began the original arc project to seed distant worlds with life and terraform them as an escape from a ruined, polluted Earth. Kern appears again, now in multiple manifestations as an uploaded consciousness. So do the uplifted spiders and octopi of the first two books, joined in Children of Memory by giant, super-genius corvids.
The scale of the conflict is smaller this time, as a multispecies crew of explorers, including an AI copy of the ever-acerbic, borderline megalomaniacal Kern, arrives at a colony world called Imir that was terraformed centuries ago but now is barely hanging on. The inhabitants hardly remember their interstellar origins, and have been trying to eke out an existence on an inhospitable world, and over time, have begun blaming everything that goes wrong on mysteries "Seccers" who live out in the woods, just over the horizon, raiding and stealing and poisoning crops and basically taking on the role of witches or faeries.
The main viewpoint character, Liff, is a curious young girl, 26 in Imir years, about 12 in Earth years, who's smart and curious and discovers a witch in the woods. Then she notices things about the new teacher, Miranda, who's from some outlying farm no one has heard of, and who lives with an odd group of housemates who likewise don't fit in.
A straightforward lost colony story becomes a lot more complicated, because Tchaikovsky likes throwing big twists. There are explorations of the nature of sentience. The two corvids Gothi and Gethli are bound to be reader favorites. Their dialogs are both hilarious and deep, as they debate between themselves whether they are in fact sentient or merely stochastic parrots. It's a debate that is startlingly current; a few years ago, most readers might have taken this speculation with a grain of salt ("They're talking and contemplating their own self-awareness - and making jokes about it - of course they're sentient!"). But if you've played with ChatGPT 4 recently, well, Earth AI today is almost at the conversational level of Gothi and Gethli.
Avrana Kern herself, the AI with a god-complex, has to confront similar questions about her own existence. In a lot of reviews people compare this book to Peter Watts's Blindsight, another fantastic SF story that raised intriguing and scary questions about what constitutes "sentience" and whether we can even tell the difference between a true sapient being and something that's just really good at passing whatever Turing Test you throw at it.
Eventually, there is an inevitable confrontation between Miranda and her companions and the suspicious, increasingly paranoid Imirians. This leads to some non-linear back-and-forths in time, in which Liff's perspective, in particular, becomes confusing and inconsistent. Eventually this is explained with a big twist that I kind of saw coming. The question of sentience is never completely answered, but I really hope Gothi and Gethli return.
Children of Memory was a good third book in the series. I loved the first book, Children of Time, because I have always liked uplift stories (David Brin's Uplift series is one of my favorite SF series of all time) and the spiders were awesome. The second and third books have not been quite as awesome, but they're still pretty good, and Tchaikovsky's ability to churn out lengthy series that are never a let-down continues to impress me. Children of Memory is very much a sci-fi story even though parts of it have a more mythic, almost fantasy feel, and each book in the series has expanded this universe in a surprisingly hopeful manner. Humans, H-umans, spiders, octopi, bacterial hive-minds, all coexisting peacefully if sometimes uneasily.
Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky: My reviews of Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Empire in Black and Gold, Dragonfly Falling, Blood of the Mantis, The Expert System's Brother, The Expert System's Champion, and Made Things.
My complete list of book reviews.
Tor Books, 2023, 480 pages
The modern classic of space opera that began with Children of Time continues in this extraordinary novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.
Earth failed. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, Heorest Holt, carried its precious human cargo to a potential new paradise. Generations later, this fragile colony has managed to survive, eking out a hardy existence. Yet life is tough, and much technological knowledge has been lost.
Then strangers appear. They possess unparalleled knowledge and thrilling technology-and they've arrived from another world to help humanity’s colonies. But not all is as it seems, and the price of the strangers' help may be the colony itself.
Children of Memory by Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky is a far-reaching space opera spanning generations, species and galaxies.
This is the third book in the Children of Time series, Adrian Tchaikovsky's space opera about uplifted species and terraformed worlds.
Since Children of Time, a recurring character has been Avrana Kern, the scientist who began the original arc project to seed distant worlds with life and terraform them as an escape from a ruined, polluted Earth. Kern appears again, now in multiple manifestations as an uploaded consciousness. So do the uplifted spiders and octopi of the first two books, joined in Children of Memory by giant, super-genius corvids.
The scale of the conflict is smaller this time, as a multispecies crew of explorers, including an AI copy of the ever-acerbic, borderline megalomaniacal Kern, arrives at a colony world called Imir that was terraformed centuries ago but now is barely hanging on. The inhabitants hardly remember their interstellar origins, and have been trying to eke out an existence on an inhospitable world, and over time, have begun blaming everything that goes wrong on mysteries "Seccers" who live out in the woods, just over the horizon, raiding and stealing and poisoning crops and basically taking on the role of witches or faeries.
The main viewpoint character, Liff, is a curious young girl, 26 in Imir years, about 12 in Earth years, who's smart and curious and discovers a witch in the woods. Then she notices things about the new teacher, Miranda, who's from some outlying farm no one has heard of, and who lives with an odd group of housemates who likewise don't fit in.
A straightforward lost colony story becomes a lot more complicated, because Tchaikovsky likes throwing big twists. There are explorations of the nature of sentience. The two corvids Gothi and Gethli are bound to be reader favorites. Their dialogs are both hilarious and deep, as they debate between themselves whether they are in fact sentient or merely stochastic parrots. It's a debate that is startlingly current; a few years ago, most readers might have taken this speculation with a grain of salt ("They're talking and contemplating their own self-awareness - and making jokes about it - of course they're sentient!"). But if you've played with ChatGPT 4 recently, well, Earth AI today is almost at the conversational level of Gothi and Gethli.
Avrana Kern herself, the AI with a god-complex, has to confront similar questions about her own existence. In a lot of reviews people compare this book to Peter Watts's Blindsight, another fantastic SF story that raised intriguing and scary questions about what constitutes "sentience" and whether we can even tell the difference between a true sapient being and something that's just really good at passing whatever Turing Test you throw at it.
Eventually, there is an inevitable confrontation between Miranda and her companions and the suspicious, increasingly paranoid Imirians. This leads to some non-linear back-and-forths in time, in which Liff's perspective, in particular, becomes confusing and inconsistent. Eventually this is explained with a big twist that I kind of saw coming. The question of sentience is never completely answered, but I really hope Gothi and Gethli return.
Children of Memory was a good third book in the series. I loved the first book, Children of Time, because I have always liked uplift stories (David Brin's Uplift series is one of my favorite SF series of all time) and the spiders were awesome. The second and third books have not been quite as awesome, but they're still pretty good, and Tchaikovsky's ability to churn out lengthy series that are never a let-down continues to impress me. Children of Memory is very much a sci-fi story even though parts of it have a more mythic, almost fantasy feel, and each book in the series has expanded this universe in a surprisingly hopeful manner. Humans, H-umans, spiders, octopi, bacterial hive-minds, all coexisting peacefully if sometimes uneasily.
Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky: My reviews of Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Empire in Black and Gold, Dragonfly Falling, Blood of the Mantis, The Expert System's Brother, The Expert System's Champion, and Made Things.
My complete list of book reviews.