Book Review: Children of Ruin
The mind-bending, masterful sequel to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time.
I loved Children of Time. It became one of my favourite books, and it was the first time I’d read anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky. You can read what I had to say about it here. Children of Ruin, then, is the second book in Adrian’s trilogy, and it’s taken me far too long to get around to reading it!
Blurb
It has been waiting through the ages. Now it's time . . .
Thousands of years ago, Earth’s terraforming program took to the stars. On the world they called Nod, scientists discovered alien life – but it was their mission to overwrite it with the memory of Earth. Then humanity’s great empire fell, and the program’s decisions were lost to time.
Aeons later, humanity and its new spider allies detected fragmentary radio signals between the stars. They dispatched an exploration vessel, hoping to find cousins from old Earth.
But those ancient terraformers woke something on Nod better left undisturbed. And it’s been waiting for them.
Review
Children of Ruin follows another detachment of the human terraforming project of the distant past that saw the creation of Kern’s World in the first novel. Different scientists, different star system, similar circumstances and pressures. However, this time, there’s two planets: Damascus and Nod. Damascus is an ice world, ripe for terraforming and turning into a oceanic paradise, whereas Nod contains a wholly alien biosphere—something never seen before. Actual alien life not dependent on, derived from, or compatible with Earth chemistry in the slightest (though it still has an oxygenated atmosphere).
This book’s format differs from the previous entry: This time we alternate in parts between the past—following the actions and consequences of the terraforming project—and the present—following the journey of the Human/Portiid starship which departed from Kern’s World as they trace a tantalising signal from the star system containing Nod and Damascus. However, we still have the switching back and forth between present tense and past tense that seems to show up fairly often in Adrian’s work.
The plot was great. I really enjoyed the story going on, and it had plenty of twists and turns. I enjoyed the unfolding mystery of Nod and the way the Humans and Portiids of Kern’s World desperately tried to communicate with the Octopuses of Damascus.
Adrian really is a master of evolutionary worldbuilding. Sometimes it can be a bit on the dry side, but he conveys the alienness of it brilliantly. The book explores the question of how we can possibly expect to understand the truly alien, when it’s nigh-on impossible to understand the minds and communication methods of other species related to us. And just because Humans and Portiids live and work together now, doesn’t mean there isn’t still a communication barrier, and this is explored through all the different methods the crew of the ship have employed to facilitate it - whether mechanical or through attempts to truly understand the psyche of the spiders. Then the Octopuses are even more different, complex and alien. It was fascinating and I loved it. And that’s another thing we get in this book: actual aliens, beings completely unrelated to Earth life utilising entirely different (and incompatible) chemistry and genetics, doing things that don’t make sense from an Earth-centric viewpoint, and it was brilliant.
So, overall I would highly recommend this. It perhaps didn’t hit quite as hard as the first book, but I’m fascinated to see where the trilogy ends up. I already have Children of Memory on my shelf waiting.
