Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The terraforming effort of Earth began in space a long time ago. Scientists discovered alien life on the world they dubbed Nod, but it was their goal to erase it from existence by writing the memory of Earth. Then the great human empire fell, and the program’s choices were forgotten by the passage of time.
Several aeons later, humanity and its new spider companions discovered shards of radio transmissions between the stars. In an effort to locate distant relatives from the old Earth, they sent out an exploring vessel. But those prehistoric terraformers on Nod awakened something that should be left alone.
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
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Children of Ruin perfectly follows the amazing story of mankind’s inheritors from the gorgeous generational, evolutionary science fiction novel Children of Time. The story weaves together elements of discovery, terror, and hope for the far future. It contains everyone: humans, spiders, cephalopods, AI, cyborgs, shambling nameless monsters, and creepy nightmares. Really, pick up this book and read it right away.
First contact encounters’ exponentially worsening challenges with cultural diversity are caused by biodiversity. Very inventive and unique life forms, attitudes, backstories, issues, and solutions. a grand scale spanning several LYs of space and many character generations. These kinds of stories are really challenging to portray to the reader, but they have been done successfully here.
The story arc that started with Children of Time is now complete, bringing it to a satisfyingly triumphal conclusion. Ironically, this triumphalism was written by people who believed in the manifest human destiny and found the obsolescence of Earth and the sparsity of its diaspora to be an intolerable diminution. This is not Starship Troopers, but it ends with a more sophisticated and delicate victory—one won by peace as opposed to war.
Tchaikovsky’s logo praxis is superb, and the narrative arc he creates is very much a book of ideas with a solid, if not strictly scientific, underpinning.
Interspecies communication is one of his main themes, and he does a good job of expressing the viewpoints of various intelligent species, including slime mould, spiders, octopuses, and primates. However, as each species deviates further from the human baseline, the characters of each species become increasingly shallow.
Although fairly lean, the space opera component is skillfully constructed as a cogent backdrop for the interaction of persons and ideas. Throughout, the emphasis is on the viewpoints and exploits of the characters as well as the embodiment of consciousness, cognition, and communication, with physics having considerably less part than biology, sociology, and network science.
