Book of Review: "Children of Memory" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

*Spoilers ahead!*

4/5 stars

I’m going to start this off by saying how much the third entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” series, Children of Memory, reminded me of Star Trek. Why will become more apparent soon.

Once again, Tchaikovsky’s trademark superb worldbuilding is at work here, bringing readers through the start and collapse of whole civilizations before zooming in to the more personal perspectives of our main characters exploring said wreckage of previous civilizations.

The multispecies coalition we last see form in the previous book, Children of Ruin, is exploring the vastness of space together in an interesting fusion of inorganic and organic technology. 

There’s “Humans,” the capitalization indicating that these humans have been infected with an empathy-inducing virus so as to get along with their super-intelligent spider (Portiids) and octopus (Octopus) partners. (The Corvids, an extremely smart species of bird, join this expedition later in the book.)

“Products of different world and evolutionary paths—natural and accelerated—yet like her. The same drive to know burned in them, a convergence in the way their intellects worked, so that each species had reached the point where, faced with a mystery, they had to unravel it. Perhaps with the birds it was more pathology and less psychology, and what Paul might do with the answers differed from the way a Portiid would respond to them. But then and there, the finding out was everything.”

Then there’s just “humans,” lower-case “h,” including those who terraformed various worlds to varying degrees of success and then died out in a catastrophic war. These humans are understood to be more prone to using a flamethrower against a Portiid rather than working together to collect data on undiscovered phenomena.

It is not known what happened to these humans, if they all truly died out in the war, because in the last desperate days of Earth, various ark ships were sent out to colonize other worlds. 

Also, there is another partner in this relationship that is more of a multi-cellular parasite, a composite organism. Known as “Nodans,” after their planet of origin, “Nod,” these organisms are driven by the pursuit of novelty, and their worldview suddenly got magnified hundreds of times when they first encounter human explorers. As in, picture every zombie movie. That’s pretty much what happened to those first poor human explorers.

After much time, there is a détente, that the Nodans can expand their knowledgebase by being decanted into ready-made artificially-grown bodies. This way they can join the galaxy-wide coalitions without any unfortunate inter-species incidents.

For those who’ve watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, this storyline should sound familiar. Nodans are similar to shape-shifting Changelings, most famously represented by Odo, security chief of the fictional Starfleet station, Deep Space Nine. Another plotline centers around the various simulations you see in Star Trek filler episodes, for the most part immersive, but not as indistinguishable from reality as they are in Children of Memory.

“‘It’s not life,’ Kern-major tells her. ‘It was never life. It was just…life fan-fiction.’”

Okay, before I gush so much about my excitement of the exploration of composite organisms and simulations, we have the crew of one such exploration ship, composed of Portiids, one acerbic AI, two incredibly smart Corvids, a Nodan-Human hybrid, an octopus, and more. They come across the semi-terraformed planet of Imir, and are excited to find signs of a limited presence of life, a thriving human colony. Miranda is dispatched to conduct a “limited” expedition of the colony, Landfall.

This reminded me, of course, of Star Trek’s penchant for similar anthropological explorations of less developed cultures (“pre-warp civilizations”), and their insistence on letting their natural civilizational development progress without their interference (the Prime Directive). We know how Captain James T. Kirk regarded the Prime Directive of course, and similarly, Miranda takes unexpected liberties with her expedition, joining the town as a teacher from the out-farms.

Miranda, the Nodan-Human hybrid, was one of the more fascinating characters in this one.

“She is a cultural leech, meaningless without the society she has burrowed into, and because of this she spends her time trying to give back to it. What has more sense of obligation than a parasite, after all?”

Things get very confusing, extremely fast. Because in order to trick us in a very mystery/thriller way, Tchaikovsky intentionally shifts small things about the narrative throughout the book, in such a fashion as to clue readers in to the fact that something was wrong, that are narrators were perhaps not as trustworthy as they seemed. Seen mostly through the eyes of Liff, the purported granddaughter of a Founder, Captain Heorest Holt, things in Landfall take a turn for violence when outsiders enter the picture (particularly Miranda).

The colony is dying, their crops failing as their artificial ecosystem falls apart, but is Miranda’s presence enough to accelerate its doom?

Find out when you read Children of Memory. It’s a deeply philosophical, earnest, and interesting look at the nature of consciousness, sentience, and the possibility we all exist in an exceptionally good simulation.

Happy reading!

--BookOwl