Children of Memory (Children of Time, 3)

As a successor to children of time and children of ruin it's an excellent book in the series. But as the final book there's certainly a sense of loss for the world and the collection of Humans and their little adventure, barring spinoffs or continuations. I suppose at the scale of these books there can never be a proper ending in terms of finality, there's more to tell until there can be no more anything. I was floored at how well the book presented philosophy of mind towards the end, having studied philosophy myself academically for a time I think the example broached by the corvids is the best summation of eliminative materialism put to word. My biggest gripe with the trilogy as a whole is probably how much of the books feel like empty space bridging the diamonds of speculative biology, psychology and philosophy and this book is not an exception - I found myself speed reading chapters at a time to get to the parts I was invested in. It's very much worth reading but as a final book in a trilogy it leaves the whole feeling lacking to me, like the universe presented would be better told as a large anthology of shorter stories

I like to compare books to food… Detective/Police Procedurals are like Fish and chips, you know what you’re going to get and it’s ultimately satisfying. Comedies are McDonald’s, fun at the time but not that memorable. 1984 is a Sunday Roast, A classic that everyone should try. Children of Memory is so much more than just a meal, it’s a full-on menu of overly complicated, Michelin stared, fine dining. With amuse-bouche between every course, foams, reductions and tweels. When all you really want is Steak and Chips Sci-fi. It rambles and rambles on, never quite getting to the point, all the while Adrian is dazzling and confusing us with more synonyms than Roget’s Thesaurus. I really enjoyed Children of Time and Children of Ruin, I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy Children of Memory anywhere near as much.

With matters amongst the Humans, Spiders, Octopodes and Slime Mould now resolved the Universe is their oyster and it's time to go on an adventure and find out how some of the other human terraforming and ark ship projects turned out. On the planet Rourke we discover the human settlers all dead and the planet in the stewardship of smart Ravens. Not quite as enigmatic as the octopodes, but probably more entertaining, they introduce the main theme of this work. What is sentience. The Ravens claim not to be sentient, they also claim that after careful analysis no other creature can make the claim to sentience either. With two crows now aboard the crew, containing a representative of every species encountered so far and the ubiquitous Kern we continue the adventure to discover the fate of another ark ship and its landfall at a partially terraformed planet. So far so space adventure, but that's about to change. The survey team enter a strange realm where time and causality appear broken, or glitchy. A small rural town surrounded by a dark, dripping, winter forest, mountains and a cave where a witch is living. We have entered Holdstock territory. Liff, a young girl tried to make sense of events through her book of fairy stories. Can she trick the witch into undoing the curse and releasing her grandfather ? This is a really strong ending to the series, there's obviously a lot more ark ships out there, what did they did discover ? And a wider universe full of aliens and wonders yet to be discovered ? Can Adrian explore this universe with his current cast of characters ? I would dearly like to hear more from the crows but I don't know, everyone seems to have reached a plateau of technological mastery it's hard to see what could challenge them in the end. And that is the only problem with this book, even though the events are very puzzling you never get the impression anything is going on outside of the capability of the survey team to ultimately sort out.

We finally have the final book in the Children of Time trilogy, and it does not disappoint! The scope of this book is a little different than the first two. Those were all about the exploration and evolution and discovery. But for the most part this book is a much smaller scale. It’s one world…one town…one girl, Liff. And yet it really isn’t that simple, is it? For a lot of Liff’s story you’re going to be confused. There are a lot of time jumps, so pay attention to the chapter headers. Just roll with it, things will be explained. I think it was so beautifully done, and shows both the futility and the hopefulness that I think are inherent in all of Tchaikovsky‘s work. This is the ninth book that I’ve read from this author, and almost all of them have been five stars. And I’ve come to realize that the way he writes, the choice of words that he uses and how he puts them together, really makes my brain work (in a good way). It’s so difficult to rate books on a 1 to 5 scale, when you have authors who do such stellar work. I may have to come up with some sort of new rating scale just for top tier books 🤷🏼‍♀️

I really enjoyed the first book in this series, "Children of Time". I thought the followup, "Children of Ruin", was pretty good. I had high hopes for "Children of Memory" and pre-ordered it. Unfortunately, "Children of Memory" is the Godfather Part 3 of this trilogy, meaning it would be best to just pretend it doesn't exist. It's one of those stories that presents a mystery and drops hints leading to a big reveal. That only works if the big reveal is really good. This one isn't. It's bad. It's so bad I wished I had bought the print edition just so I could have the satisfaction of throwing the book in the garbage can afterwards. It's almost an inversion of early science fiction, where instead of good ideas wrapped in bad writing it's a bad idea wrapped in good writing. Adrian Tchaikovsky can write good stuff (I highly recommend "Cage of Souls") but this one's a clunker.