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