Book Review: Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is the third book that started with Children of Time. It continues shortly after the prior one, Children of Ruin, left off and is another take of terraforming efforts gone wrong and the subsequent events as the descendants of humanity rediscover them. Here is the Goodreads blurb:

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.

Read on for my spoiler-free review.

Overall Impression

This was a bit of a weirder book compared to its predecessors. We still have plenty of thought-provoking moments with inter-species interactions, but the setting makes it a bit more convoluted and almost fantastical- it takes a while to get to the big conclusions. I still enjoyed it, but not as much as the prior book.

Plot

Each of the prior books has had a very interesting narrative structure that ping-ponged between two main view points, sometimes separated by time, distance, or just perspective. Usually, a mystery is set up in one, then we move to the next arc of the story where we discover how that was set up in the past or something like that. In this book, the lines are somewhat blurrier. We go back and forth between relatively recent times, so to speak, but the nature of one of the viewpoints is just baffling until the very end so we don't get clarity as the story progresses. I think this is probably the biggest fault of this one. The story itself is very interesting in retrospect, but held back by trying to hide too much at each moment.

Characters

There's a couple of recurring characters here, like Kern, Portia, Fabian, Paul, as well as new ones like Liff, Heorest Holt, Miranda, Gothi and Gethli. Some of these are iterations of ones we've known before, with the same personalities and such, while others are brand new. Chief among them are Liff and Miranda, the later being a host of the Nodan slime mold, and their interactions in the planet Imir drive a lot of the story. The two corvids, Gothi and Gethli, also play a central role but it was hard for me to keep track of who was who between them (which I think may have been the point).

Setting / World Building

The setting of this series is fascinating and keeps delivering. As a continuation after Children of Ruin, we benefit from the new faster-than-light engine the Octopuses from Damascus have developed. There's also a real sense of a budding inter-species community as there are now 4 main species that make this group- Humans, Portiids, Octopuses, and the reformed Nodan mold. Their perspectives are very different and part of how fun the story can be.

In this novel in particular, we visit two other terraforming worlds. One, Rourke, established a bit of a foothold, but like the others, suffered from the virus that shut down all equipment. The process was never finished, but a species of crows were able to flourish in a sense. The other, Imir, was very distant and it's process was barely begun. It's visited by the Enkidu, another ark ship reminiscent of the Gilgamesh from the first book, and it has to establish a foothold however it can, but there is something out in the hills that calls to them.

Final Thoughts

This was a fun book and opens up some interesting possibilities for more potential adventures in this universe. However, in my opinion its the weakest of the three books thus far. While parts of it are very cool, the big mystery of Imir is a bit too dense and drags on without a clear resolution until the very end of the book. Once it does, it's fine and very clever, it just takes too long to get there. I do look forward to seeing how the series continues, with the hope that some of the formula gets shaken up a bit.