#Children of memory

[remnantglow]

[parttimecosmichorror]

It's always Avrana Kern this, Avrana Kern that, but what about my girl/sentient alien microbe Miranda? Who has no real sense of identity and is terrified that one day she'll lose control and start consuming and subsuming everyone around her? What about the Miranda copy that survived a hundred lifetimes in Landfall, trying to save a city and people that never existed, and who was then rescued and brought face-to-face with the version of her that never knew Liff? What about the Nodan entity that remembers its entire past but has to live out a myriad of different presents? What about the dissonance of realizing that you might not be the same entity after all, until you're reunited with the rest of yourself? What about the original Human Miranda, who gave her self over to an alien microbe, believing that it was for the better good? What about Miranda?

[approximateknowledge]

children of time be like

Book 1: some of the best spec-evo in fiction combined with writing that makes the humans more alien than the giant sentient jumping spiders

Book 2: an exploration of cephalopod sophonce combined with what's basically a combination of an advanced quasi-zombie horror story that's also baffling xenofiction if looked at from the other side

Book 3: a collection of contradictory fairy tales from a society that never existed as retold by people who aren't quite people, except the one who is a person, but she doesn't exist beyond the tales she was born in, again and again and again

and it's great

go read these books

trust me

[astronomalyy]

terraformers and their worlds...

[literary-illuminati]

My unironic hot take is that the Children of Time series (sequels, especially) is better star trek on a thematic level than ant actual star trek that's come out since at least 9/11

[clonerightsagenda]

Miranda: I'm going to get a good grade in being Miranda, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve

[rorybluez]

one of the joys of finishing children of time is a bunch of fans making sure to reply to almost every single "woah! Portia spiders are so intelligent" comment with an "allow me to introduce you to CoT books!!" and promote them with the vigour of a bachelor in marketing degree. You can nearly feel the overly enthusiastic desire to infodump behind their comments (tbh same). Shout-out to those meme spreading fellow spider fans, I salute you.

[dude1818]

Children of Memory

Actual review of Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky now. I'll admit I wasn't super excited for this one. Time was great, but Ruin fell a little flat for me. The latter was trying to do the same thing as the former, but had to up the weirdness to 11. And then its epilogue presented this post-scarcity, FTL-enabled civilization, somewhere between Star Trek and the Culture, and I didn't see how that could support a third telling of the same basic plot

Boy was I wrong. Other than a brief aside for the introduction of the Corvid sapient race, Memory decided to tell the story of an actual ark ship colony, separate from the uplift projects the first two books were about. There were two main characters: Liff, a 13 year girl born on the dying colony; and Miranda, an explorer from the Uplift civilization who leads the infiltration team prior to first contact. All of the Children of books lean heavily on jumping back and forth between different POVs at very different points in the timeline, but I appreciated that this one focused a lot more on these two in particular (even while the timeline still kept jumping). It made it feel a lot more grounded than the other two

Miranda was a fantastic character. She was actually part of the Nodan entity, now that it's struck a truce with the Uplift civilization. Giving a grey goo organism a redemption arc can be interesting on its own: it's gone from absorbing others into itself to attempting to preserve the cultures it comes across, since it values diversity now. But then the role reversal where in order to save the individuals of this colony, they will have to reveal the Uplift civilization, which will definitionally destroy the culture they're trying to save. It is an incredible conflict to watch Miranda struggle with. (Also, I love how "going on an adventure" was still in her vocab, and it kept making people flinch re: the events of Ruin)

The Corvids, Gothi and Gethli, were also great. We only got occasional glimpses from their POV, but their banter was hilarious. I love a Chinese room character that knows it's a Chinese room. There was a lot of philosophy about what it means to be sapient at the end, and while Gothi and Gethli concluded that they were like the ants that run Kern's AI, I felt they were more like the Octopuses. Based on the events of Ruin, I was never really convinced that the Octopuses were properly sapient, since they have three disjoint minds that don't communicate. Although, the Corvids also act like an extreme version of this deeply unsettling neuroscience evidence that suggests a human brain has separate consciousnesses in each hemisphere, only one of which "you" are aware of

The plot itself started straightforward. The terraforming on this world was not enough to establish a stable ecosystem, so by the time the recon ship arrives, it's starting to break down. As they infiltrate, the people are going hungry and turning on their neighbors. (Somewhat similar to Arkhangelsk, which if I had realized, I would have waited longer between them. It's a little heavy.) Around halfway through the book, things go real bad for Miranda et al, and then it gets weird (almost Harrow the Ninth style). I had a pretty accurate hunch for the twist this was setting up, but that didn't matter really, since it didn't give away anything about how they were going to get there

But then at the 90% point the book revealed an ever bigger reverse twist, and holy shit, I was not prepared for that. The first twist had been revealed at that point and Miranda's character knowledge was supposed to line up with the audience again, so pulling the rug out again was so much more impactful. Incredible ending. I was sated at the end of Time and Ruin, but now at the last book in the trilogy I want more of these particular characters

[dustywave]

i want ursula scavengers reign to meet miranda children of memory. i think they could vibe

[pheonix199]

So I just finished Children of Memory. Oh my god.

Oh my god.

So good.

The reveals at the end

God, none of it was real. Nothing on Imir, in landfall, none of it was real.

There was no Landfall.

The shuttle crashed.

Nobody got off the Endiku alive.

All of that was Miranda having a breakdown while hooked into an alien simulator.

And yet ... that doesn't matter. A good enough simulation of a person is a person. Dr Kern the upload, Miranda the Interlocutor, and Liff the simulated.

They're real.

The computer's could-have-been Landfall ... it was real enough to create people Miranda and the others could bring into the physical world.

God it fucked me up and made me think.

[remnantglow]

children of memory by adrian tchaikovsky spoiler

[parttimecosmichorror]

I'm not sure I'll ever be normal about Landfall. A city that lived and died a thousand times, dead before it ever lived. A city that isn't a city at all, but it is one to someone, to something. A city that never existed except it did, a thousand times. A city trapped in a cycle to the point where it's defined by that cycle. An alien computer keeping it alive from iteration to iteration but never making it exist, performing the same play for an audience of zero, playing with dolls in a dollhouse, reading the same book again and again and again even though all the lines and all the turns are already known, going into the story knowing Landfall is dead. And when something new enters that story, it tries and tries and tries to make it work, to go back to what it figured out, but the result doesn't change and Landfall keeps dying over and over and over again. Whatever the purpose of the simulation was, it has landed on an immutable future. Landfall was doomed from the start, from even before the start. No flap of a butterfly's wings could change its fate. And yet the computer kept going. Is it not a sort of mind of its own, stuck studying the sameness of something it both created but has no real control over? Does it not think? Does it still hope for a better future?

[approximateknowledge]

i love how the children of time trilogy spends 2 books talking about "Imperial C" as one of the main languages the terraforming-era humans used and it's never further elaborated upon, and then you get to the third book and it's revealed in a very oblique way that Imperial C is, in fact, English

because Avrana Kern decided to make a gog damn *pun* about there being no "i" in "ants" but there is one in "spiders" (and it's explicitly pointed out the joke only makes sense in "Imperial C") (which is also very funny considering she's an upload running on a computing substrate of quasi-uplifted ants, she's quite litterally the "i" in the ants)

[darth-moth]

@god-slayer-apprentice

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #34 – Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Overview

I have had this on my list for long enough for my request that the local library get a copy actually result in me getting my hands on it. It’s the third instalment (the last? I’m not sure – the ending here felt like far less of a natural conclusion than the ending to either of the previous two) of what is for my money some of the absolute best space opera (maybe even just science fiction writ large) of the last decade. I actually opened it with a real sense of trepidation; Children of Ruin had ended on an optimistic, open-ended note, with the creation of an interstellar and inter species society that was both deeply aspirational and incredibly alien. I wasn’t sure how a book from their perspective would even work. Thankfully, my fears were basically misplaced – there’s definitely a drift in tone and focus from where the series started, but the thematic heart’s still there, and this was overall a joy to read.

Synopsis

Following the end of Children of Ruin, we have a nomadic society of uplifted spiders and squids, Humans (the capitalization signifies infection by an engineered retrovirus to help with empathy and accepting/valuing the Other), the formerly all-consuming alien microbal parasites of Nod (who have agreed to only assimilate the identities of those who expressly consent to the process), and various instances of Avranda Kern (millennia old upload of a meglomaniacal mad scientist who is by a quirk of history now the OS all computers run on). After making tentative Second Contact with a half-terraformed world now inhabited by a civilization of debatably-sentient crows, an exploration ship takes on a pair of them as ambassadors before finding their way to way what seems to be a struggling but holding on colony founded by one of the last arkships of refugees to escape the ruins of Old Earth. .

Intercut with this is the narrative of that arkship arriving, very much the worse for wear after two thousand years and change hurtling through the void with its crew and cargo in cryo. The world is hardly what they hoped for – only ever half-terraformed, breathable atmosphere and some basic engineered microbal life, but entirely lacking any sort of biosphere – but it’s not like they have another option. They make the best of it they can, using what working technology they have to bootstrap a basic ecosystem of pigs and trees, a few species of bugs and fungi, enough to farm and build with. And the core crew holds out hope that the faint trace of a strange signal buried in the hills near their colony might lead to something more.

Intercut with that is the story of Liff, a young girl in the colony as things take a turn for the worse. That’s when things start to get weird.

Xenophilia

The best way for me to get across the central theme of this whole series is ‘more star trek than star trek’ (or at least, than any star trek produced since I’ve come of age). It believes is absolutely nothing so strongly as it believes in the pure and perfect virtue of curiosity, that the point of existence is to discover, and to share what you have discovered with those around you. It is an oft-repeated point that the overwhelming majority of the universe is cold and empty, and anything different is worth seeking out and treasuring for its own sake – that every shred of diversity is the cosmos is a wonder in its own right.

Which is the entire purpose our protagonist’s civilization has set themselves – the distributed fleet of pathological scientists and novelty-seekers, leaving behind teeming cities and orbital habitats for a life seeking the mysteries of the universe with tiny circles of peers. It’s very Starfleet, in its most idealistic and elevator-pitch form.

And even beyond them, curiosity, discovery and exploration are treated as basically heroic wherever they’re found – Captain Holt and the Enkidu might have been doomed, but they’re still presented as deeply and wholly admirable for trying.

It goes beyond that, too. This is one of vanishingly few space opera settings I can think of with a cast full of distinct and dissimilar species, where none of them are orcs. Or dragons, for that matter. No matter how monstrous and horrifying a species seems – spiders the size of your head, the mad remnant of an ancient demiurge, all-consuming and replicating alien parasites – the answer is diplomacy, outreach, communication. Both sequels in the series have begun with a civilization formed through the total (though not seamless) integration of alien societies from the last book into a greater whole. The parasites from Children of Ruin best exemplify this, I think – convinced that consuming and assimilating everything it can reach will result in nothing but a universe of itself, compared to walking through the world with a soft touch and appreciating all the different dynamics that can develop through so many myriad perspectives. And now one of them is basically the book’s main protagonist (and very guilty about all the nonconsensually-eating-people thing).

Whereas in Memory it’s not exactly subtle that the intolerance and violence against social deviants is presented as basically a symptom of material scarcity and desperation. When Landfall is doing well, the little band of infiltrators – strange, nonverbal artist, discomfortingly informative schoolteacher, standoffish and thoroughly gender nonconforming woodswoman – are affectionately tolerated and appreciated for what they can do. When the harvests are bad and the forests are rotting – well who even needs abstract art or history lessons to begin with? They’re lashed out at, used as just one of a growing set of scapegoats, and when things are dire enough, again and again, they end up on the noose. Intolerance is a self-harming reflex, a wounded animal lashing out because it can neither understand nor change the actual source of its pain. Again, Star Trek but moreso.

The ‘moreso’ does a lot of work in this comparison, to be fair. The series shares Star Trek’s deep love of science just like it shares its pathological liberalism – it’s just consistent about it. The crew explorers are casually transhuman (transarachnid, transcephlopod, etc) - immortal and physically enhanced, capable of sharing and downloading both memories and skills, visibly aging or carrying scars only as a fashion statement. It is treated as a casual fact of life that letting an experiment progress might mean going into cold sleep for decades or centuries, if there is no better way for a group of six on a small ship to while away the time while they wait. Technology has conquered scarcity on anything like a personal scale, and the explorers take full advantage.

Which is probably downstream of the books not being particularly caught up on ‘humanity’. I mean, humans are there – are very important! - but to the extent they’re the axis the universe turns upon, it’s only the ghosts of the old empire. Modern humans are just one part of interstellar civilization, and not even its most numerous or prominent. Humans have a unique way of thinking (as does everyone else) but no monopoly on heroic drive or virtue.

Curious Corvids

Each book in the series feels marketed around a different uplifted animal arising from the ruins of humanity’s imperial glory and galaxy-spanning hubris. This is not wrong, but it definitely becomes less right as the series progresses.

Children of Time is about the spiders. There’s humans too, sure, but I’ve yet to see a single person who read for the Gilgamesh plotline. By wordcount and thematic focus and just what makes it an interesting book, it is about the evolution of Portid intelligence and civilization across the millennia. The real protagonist of the novel is the species.

Children of Ruin is still kind of about the uplifting of the Squids. Senkovi’s efforts and relationship with them gets a decent amount of focus, as does the development of their civilization after the terraformers’ death. They just share top billing with the alien aliens, and rather than just being the climax of the story Second Contact is the real meat of the entire plot.

In Children of Ruin the introduction of the corvids almost feels like a publisher mandate – their history and backstory is basically brushed over in the prologue and one interlude, Second Contact basically a triviality. It’s not that they’re not important to the book or its themes, or that they’re not interesting (in both cases they very much are!), but they feel like a b-plot. Supporting what the book is about, not defining it.

Which to be clear, is from a writing perspective almost certainly the correct choice – ‘Children of Time but with a different species’ would still be fascinating, but it really doesn’t cohere as a continuing and linked series. I just think you could have dug some more meat out of the abbreviated history given there. What fanfic is for, I suppose.

It’s a funny sort of distinction that unlike the others, the corvids aren’t technically uplifts – the considered opinion of the series is that while spiders and squids would require millenia of nanite-assisted directed evolution to develop anything that looks like human-level sapience, in the right environment crows would just Do That (admittedly with the addition of alien radiation scrambling DNA and increasing mutation rate by an order of magnitude or two).

The other trend with the different uplift species as the series has gone on is that with each book they become neurologically and psychologically weird. The spiders had Understandings and a bunch of predator- and cannibal-instincts, but they’re still each an individual intelligence. The squids are a central brain and a bunch of semi-autonomous limbs which are only barely on speaking terms with the conscious mind. And now the crows are not individually intelligent at all – they think and live in pairs, one observing and recalling, the other analyzing and inferring, actual intelligence appearing only in the dialogue and interaction between the two. Which makes chapters from their POV very entertaining, at least.

Sentience and Identity

The book’s very interested in both – it’s probably the most central and explicit theme of the entire thing. Our crows, having given the matter thorough and careful reflection, eventually decided that they weren’t sentient at all (that nothing is, really) – or at least, that’s the series of sounds they make when asked. Our other main characters include:

an alien parasite which has assimilated a copy of a woman’s consciousness and now imitates her so well she often forgets she’s anything else

a copy of a sliver of an instance of an upload of an ancient terraformer, who for a nontrivial period of time was running on hard that was mostly ant colony

an extremely detailed simulation of someone who could have but never did exist

(arguably) the simulation they are running on.

The book comes down pretty solidly on a ‘if it quacks like a duck’ model of personhood – and cheats a bit in terms of giving most of the above POV chapters and obvious internal monologues – but the question of who counts as sentience and as a person, and of what ‘sentient’ and ‘person’ even mean – are ones that various characters spend a lot of time and angst on.

The answer the book arrives at isn’t exactly a surprise – see above, more star trek than star trek – but it’s still an interesting angle to look at everyone from.

Genre Ambiguity

The book is clearly, self-evidently science fiction, but Tchaikovsky still has a lot of fun playing around with some fantasy tropes and imagery in it. Liff is an adolescent who dearly loves her book of ancient fairy-tales, and so our view of Landfall and the world beyond it, which means basically her entire plotline is narrated with a fairy-tale sensibility. In fairness, Kern and the crows do an excellent job accidentally seeming like a witch and her familiars. Landfall’s whole deal seeming a lot more like a fairy curse than anything from the inside doesn’t hurt, either.

While it’s science fiction, Memory is definitely softer science fiction than the previous books in the series. In general, human- and human-descended technology all at least has the convincing appearance of rigour and plausibility, while anything alien falls solidly into the real of space magic plot devices. So we get elaborate narration on the exact details of how the crew of the Enkidu bootstrap a functional ecology around Landfalll before their high technology begins giving out, but the simulator buried in the hills Just Works. Which as neat a way to do the division as any, really, but there’s a real shift in tone from Time where just about everything feels like it’s from the first category. I mean, they have fTL now!

Conclusion

This isn’t really a book I’d call groundbreaking – Children of Time has much more of a claim to novelty in both subject and presentation – but it’s one that I think solidly achieves everything it tries to? The writing’s good, the characters all cohere, the themes are explored intelligently. Plus, Kern is probably one of my favourite characters of all time.

So y’know if you don’t have major issues with spiders, multiple POVs and unclear timelines, or existential angst, would solidly recommend.

[clonerightsagenda]

It's a stretch but folding Miranda ChildrenofMemory into my protection under my #clonerights policy. She's an intelligent slime mold. She almost turned the universe into the gray goo problem because she wanted to check it out. She can recreate the personalities of everyone she interfaces with including the people she ate but doesn't do those ones very often because they're mad about it. She's the living archive of an interplanetary alliance. If startled she's liable to return to the gray goo thing. She's simulated consciousnesses all the way down and thinks computers should have rights. She's even transgender.