Children of Ruin

Children of Ruin would have been far more deserving for the Arthur C. Clarke award than Children of Time (though I suppose this sequel wouldn't exist without the first book). I found it far more interesting a read. It has more concepts, bigger ideas, and surprises. I was few times reminded of Blindsight by Peter Watts -- I wonder if Adrian Tchaikovsky had read and been influenced by it.

In its past timeline, Children of Ruin follows another peak humanity operation -- this time just a terraforming project to make a planet habitable, although it too does lead to an uplifting of a lesser species when plans change.

The uprising against technology hits this team as well. Tchaikovsky expands that the reason it being so effective is because everyone uses the same connected virtual system on every ship and device. Naturally a successful attack against such a system would be devastating. Its security is also described being weak. I find the thing not quite the most plausible situation but at least it does explain how it would be possible for the whole of humankind to lose much of its technological advancements.

In the present, a spider and human crewed exploration ship Voyager from the previous novel's Kern's World arrives to the scene to discover space-faring cephalopods. The squids are the result of a hobby-turned-to-life-work of Disra Senkovi of the terraforming crew and who was quite envious of Avrana Kern. Senkovi used the same nanovirus as Kern to make his pets smarter but the workings of an octopus's mind are so alien to human that even over his lengthy lifespan Senkovi never learned to properly communicate with them.

"He had bred them and mutated them and played all sorts of God, and now they wanted to know why and he had no answer."

Tchaikovsky's characters go through the whole debate of what is the correct plural of octopus. I have personally come to the conclusion that using other language's plural forms for loan words in English is silly: just slap an s or es to it and own the word.

Helena (who is a grandchild of Holsten from Time, if I recall correctly) and a Portia-line spider manage to eventually develop a crude translation protocol. While it does provide a way for the species to communicate, the octopuses are seemingly creatures of chaos: when a being's own body has more than one thought process that aren't in a constant agreement, imagine a whole society of such.

A common source of trouble between the book's time periods is one life form found on the initial target planet for the terraforming, later dubbed Nod. The life form, These-of-We, provides some serious scifi horror. I very much liked it.

Tchaikovsky continued with the artificial intelligence element from Time too. A Fabian-line spider and a human called Mershner are trying to enhance human-portiid understanding by using an Old Empire like virtual implant. The AI that Kern's consciousness merged with, now inhabits spaceships as well and it gets involved with Fabian's and Mershner's project -- kind of in secret and out of curiosity. The Kern AI finds itself trying to regain its human thoughts.

I liked how the Kern AI doesn't concern itself with informing the humans and spiders of its exact doings. I feel it very much retains Avrana Kern's personality in that regard. Slightly worrying aspect for an AI that is in control of your ship, come to think of it. The Kern AI is also in key role in dealing with These-of-We.

I wonder if Tchaikovsky can take the artificial intelligence study even further in the third book, Children of Memory that is to come out in November. It will be interesting to see if and how he escalates things in general. Ruin's ending already gave a glimpse into the future: will that be how Memory continues the series?

Edited 2024-01-06: Fixed a typo.