Children Of Memory - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Memory is the third in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, and much like its predecessors is, to be frank, an absolute banger of a story. It's also, that aside, a book that's difficult to describe succinctly. It's a book that grapples with big ideas about mortality and personhood, but also explores the more personal, intimate stories of people struggling to make lives in a hostile environment - and, to be fair, some of those people aren't necessarily human. That dovetailing of big ideas with emotional, honest, intimate moments is something Tchaikovsky has mastered, and it works well again here. If you're here for the raw, messy, wonderfully crafted characters, you're good. If you're here for a plot that will grab hold as tension ramps up and into catharsis and up again,..you're good. If you're here for an imaginatively crafted future and an exploration of larger concepts in a narrative framework, then again, this one's for you. Which is a long winded way of giving the short version, this is a damn good book, and you should read it. 

Speaking of the world. Well, we're in an interesting space here. Humanity is out of the bottle, in ships that can leap between solar systems, looking for any of its own. They're looking on planets that were scheduled for colonisation before the collapse of civilisation on Earth put a damper on things. Post-recovery, we're once again out here causing trouble. Though now we're doing it with friends, including sentient spiders, octopi, and bacteria which can absorb personalities and craft bodies and take them for a ride.  It's an absolutely wild space, and one that's about to get even stranger. There's two major pieces of setting at play. One is a colony, populated by humans, whose past history we're slowly exposed to over the course of the book. A hardscrabble world on the bare edge of possible survivability, and a crew struggling to make things sustainable while thawing out the frozen sleeper cargo they brought with them gives things a terrifying frontier feel.  The blend of the high tech and the low, the struggle at the edge of survivability, gives the setting an immediacy and a power it's hard to overemphasise. You can feel for these people, scrounging out a life from soil they have to make live for them, while overhead a sleeper ship circles in high orbit. And then, well, then there's the birds. Survivors of a research and terraforming team gone horribly wrong after collapse, evolving under pressure into duos that between them manage a convincing appearance of sentience, but individually definitely aren't. As characters they're fantastic, and I'll chat a bit more about that in a second, but wanted to say that the history of these duos, the desperation of a team trying to build something from the wrong side of societal collapse, that history is fantastic, Vividly imagined, authentically described, laced with the emotion and passion and horror that makes for authentic life.

The characters match that feeling actually. There's the captain of the slow seed ship, desperately trying to pull tech and crew from the shattered remnants of his craft, and build a civilisation back up from nothing. Surrounded by his command crew and survivors, you can feel the pressure on them all, you can feel the passion and energy that animates a people who know that their survival is not guaranteed. Who know that the survival of everyone after them is not guaranteed. Who know they have to build something. They're people, top to toe. But the same is true of the ravens, talking to each other and construction their discussions with other people in terms of cultural references and constructed meaning. They're people, even if they're different. And the people of our future, the octopi and the living gestalts and the spiders and the humans learning to be better. They're all people, even in they're not all humans. And the differences of their lived experience are often, though not always subtle. And it's amazing how they all feel like people, but they also feel strange. But they feel genuine, and that's what matters - the experiences are comprehensible but different, and that's sometimes hard to get used to, but it's also an absolute delight. These are living breathing real people, they're just different to us, and how we expect to be. But they're amazingly well realised, and great fun to read. 

Which is true of the story too. I won't spoil it , because there's some twists in there that took me a little while to absorb. But I will say that it works across multiple layers. This is a story which explores what it means ot be sentient. Explores the collapse and rebuilding of societies. Explores how people cope and manage in crisis. Explores identity and reality. But also explores family relationships and friendships and meaning. It doesn't shy away from either of these, and builds a story that is emotionally wracking but also an extremely compelling page-turner of action and adventure and mystery as a result. 

Which brings me back to the beginning: this book is an absolute banger, Tchaikovsky has hit it out of the park again, and you should, if you're a sci-fi fan, read it

Blackbirds - Chuck Wendig

So, Blackbirds. I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but better late than never. It’s the first in Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black series, walking alongside a woman who, on skin contact, will see how someone is going to die. Black is smart, but as sharp and cutting as strong acid. She’s hurt, and willing to let her life tailspin until, well, it doesn’t. In the meantime, she moves between jobs, between towns, between dead people, just keeping the wolf from the door, and trying not to think too hard. The universe, of course, has other plans. 

This story feels, in a lot of ways, like a contemporary thriller. Miriam Black is on the run in an America we can all recognise from television. Maybe not one we’d especially like to visit though. Cookie-cutter suiburbanism is elsewhere. These are the cockroach riddled motel rooms, the truck stop bathrooms, the silent depths of the US experience, writ large on its public consciousness. There’s something weirdly private about it too - Miriam navigates her mental geograpy as much as the physical, but both are more and less than they seem on the surface, and both have absolutely no shortage of nasty surprises. This is a space of movement, of transience, where nobody stays for long, and nobody wants to, skipping from town to town in beat up junkers or hitching a ride in a long haul truck cab while trying not to do a line of coke off the dashboard. It’s a sparse, grim place, and I’ll give Wendig credit, he evokes it with a lean, tight prose that makes you feel like you’re there, filling in the gaps between the words with, usually, something worse. It’s also a world filled with abrupt and occasionally lurid violence. Shootings, torture, bladed weapons, and some truly brutal, intimate hand to hand fighting. It’s all here, and approached in an unflinching way which, if I’m honest, didn’t sit well with me. It felt a little too much for its own sake. That said, I also know it works for a lot of people, and as a style and mood choice it fits perfectly with the story presented, so I can’t get too upset. But, you know, go in with a gore warning in front of you, and maybe take some goggles and a plastic apron,  just in case.

Speaking of the unpleasant, well, Miriam Black is not a good time protagonist. She’s smart, obviously, but miserable, seemingly getting by on not much more than coffee and attitude. Her expectations are relentlessly low, and her miserableness, her sharp edges, and her low opinion of everyone else are saturated through every line of the story. Miriam is not a nice person, and she makes a lot of bad choices because she doesn’t believe she deserves better ones. As the narrative expands, some of the forces behind her current situation become less occluded, and who she is and why she is that way make more sense. But it’s a hard read, a dive into sorrow and depression and violence. As a character, Miriam Black is wonderfully drawn, and entirely believable, but sharing her perspective is an experience that it took me several coffees to come to terms with.  The same is true of most of the cast, to be honest, though we see most of them from a little further away than Miriam’s head. They’re almost all awful in some way or another, almost all people you’d gladly push down a mineshaft, but for all that, they’re perfectly plausible as people, terrible as they may be . A few rays of light here and there mean things aren’t quite as dark as all that, but still. Again, be ready for that sort of mood-lowerer going in. 

Having said that, the story itself is a good time. It rattles along with enthusiasm, giving us interludes in Miriam’s past, slowly building her up and out from our first impression, putting in details and shifts that change our perspective even as we walk alongside her. There’s a lot going on in this one, to be fair. Murders. Drugs. Chases across country. Interrogations. Surreal antagonists. Romance, and well, not-romance. Gunfights and aftermaths. It’s a story filled with emotional moments, stitched together by violence and loss. Did I always want to keep reading? No. But did I always turn the page anyway to see what happened next? Yes. 

I’m not sure how I feel about this, in the end. If you’re in the mood for a violent supernatural thriller that’s also a slice of Americana gone bad, you’ll love it, that’s for sure - this one’s for you.