Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I would like to thank Stephen from Black Crow PR and Tor UK for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Tor UK

Published – Out Now

Price – £20 hardback £9.99 Kindle eBook

When Earth failed, it sent out arkships to establish new outposts. So 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 on Imir, eking out a hardy existence. Yet life is tough, and much technological knowledge has been lost.

Then strangers appear, on a world where everyone knows their neighbour. They possess unparalleled knowledge and thrilling new technology – for they have come from the stars, to help humanity’s lost colonies. But not all is as it seems on Imir.

As the visitors lose track of time and memories, they discover the colonists fear unknown enemies and Imir’s own murky history. Neighbour turns against neighbour, as society fractures in the face of this terrifying foe. Perhaps some other intelligence is at work, toying with colonists and space-faring scientists alike? But not all questions are so easily answered – and the price may be the colony itself.

NB – this book is the sequel following  Children of Time and  Children of Ruin both excellent books but would recommend this is not read standalone. There will be some mild spoilers for the previous books.

We now get ot the latest book in the Children of Time series. We have explored how life evolves and becomes advanced; we have explored how life can be evolve in different ways of thinking and evolution plus the power of communication. In the next instalment Adrian Tchaikovsky in the rather magnificent Children of Memory gets the reader to explore an even bigger subject – what exactly is intelligent life? This is a story of mysteries and big questions where the characters have to push themselves to their limits and for the reader that all important feeling of our minds being ever so slightly widened.

It is however a little bit of a strange book to review…

Children of Memory is set many years (possibly centuries) after the events of Children of Ruin. We have again our advanced intelligent giant spider species known as the Portiids but we also now have our enhanced Humans who have a close bond with the Portiids; our enhanced Octopus civilisation and for the first time in a major role the mysterious near immortal alien life form from the planet Nod which can absorb memories and personalities and now has also embraced the key aspect of this multi-species society -to explore the universe and hope for new life to be discovered.

Many millennia earlier a spaceship containing thousands of sleeping passengers arrived at a world that a terraforming technology was preparing for them. The colony ship Enkidu has only just survived this incredible journey with a price for the ship and its precious cargo. The Captain and crew though find the terraforming has not been fully successful the planet is only just habitable and so Captain Holt and his crew agree to create a small settlement to do the hard work to prepare the world for the rest of the crew. Generations late the settlement known as Landfall has grown but the full colony is not yet awake. A young teenager named Liff one of Captain Holt’s descendants is puzzled by her new teacher Miranda who is inquisitive and encourages discovery; she is starting to see Captain Holt’s ghost and a witch is apparently in the woods. The secrets of Imir may finally be about to be exposed.

Now this is a great time if you’re just keen to know if this is a great book that I can tell you it’s actually a brilliant book building on top of what has come before and has quite a few interesting new paths for various characters to create a hugely impressive tale.

Ok for some of you may want a little bit more…

Ready?

As with the other books Tchaikovsky takes a familiar SF idea as one core story strand. Here it’s a forgotten space colony in trouble on the planet they arrived at and then crossing their path the multi-species crew of the Portiid ship Skipper who are delighted to find ancient Humans but then trying to work out exactly what is going on this planet. It’s a very interesting mystery as the people of Imir have slightly regressed to a low tech agricultural society with no chance of ever leaving Imir on their own power as their society just is not big enough to grow very fast. The crew of the Skipper are though aware they could create a cultural earthquake by first contact have to slowly infiltrate the human settlement – who will never have dreamed of large kind sentient technologically spiders, Octopods and more. This sets up an interesting perspective for the reader as we know that the Skipper crew are good intentioned but they’re facing suspicious and scared humans who do not know that they’re no longer alone. How do you do that? What dangers are our aliens facing? This is a fairly tense world of a group of humans very wary of strangers who actually now have strangers hiding in plain sight alongside them. The more we find out we ourselves start to realise how more advanced our Portiid civilisation has grown even more advanced and also on this planet they’re ina huge amount of danger.

Into this we have two species to add to our tale. An unusual character is Miranda – the Nod lifeform in humanoid form who has recently taken on board the willing persona of a human explorer who herself has gone off to do other things. It’s the first time the Nod lifeform has had more open responsibility in a crew and for the first time taking the lead on trying to work out how to help the people of Landfall. The crew of the Skipper also have a new recently discovered uplifted species being allowed on board and are being assessed. A large Corvid bird species that has developed out of another terraforming expedition that have developed the uplift too. But in this case the Covid are a paired species. One with fantastic recall skills and the other capable of analysis and no memory. The pair we meet are named Gothi/Gethi and they’re fascinating – very curious, able to break up and then re-assemble technology (as with earth Covids they’re very clever with tools but to a greater scale) but the jury is out whether this is sentience or just a very smart animal species. Now we as the rest of the crew get to make our minds up.

For me as with Children of Ruin there is a running theme throughout the tale of what do we recognise as life? Is Miranda actually Miranda; a copy or something very old with a new face or a new entity? Are Gothi/Gethi actually smart? We also see again the return of the AI that was once a human the matriarchal no-nonsense Dr Avrana Karn these days more a ship AI but she still thinks of herself as the single human she was at the dawn of this age’s history. Is she alive? The expedition to save the settlers helps explore this theme in many unexpected ways. We as readers are asked to consider the issue of life itself from a very different angle to the ways explored in the series so far and I had the great pleasure of suddenly going ‘ooooh’. This is science fiction that will make you think and then make you have a look at yourself and the world around you just a little bit more differently.

And that’s as far as I can take it with you gentle reader. I absolutely loved Children of Memory it tells a fascinating story with unusual characters but also has its own discussion with the reader. The final acts of the book are wondrous, strange, and just a little unsettling as we consider where we as human beings fit into this narrative and there are no easy answers. Take all three books together now and we have a very intelligent, varied themes that have tackled some of the big biological questions of our age and pushed the readers out of comfort zones in the process. When you read it I will be fascinated to know what you think.