Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky was a big disappointment for me after the great Children of Ruin. I found the second book such an improvement after Children of Time that I suppose I had hoped this third one to be even better.
Children of Memory jumps back and forth between time. It features two separate planets that were the target for terraforming and colonization projects by the ancient human empire before the fall. Neither project got as far as the previously featured ones; both failed to create an Earth-like ecosystem. One of the projects, on the planet Rourke, did give birth to a Corvid species that due to the environment evolved to be seemingly very intelligent. The Corvid's ambassadors join the other species in their mission to explore space on the spacecraft Skipper.
The other planet, Imir, is the main stage for the novel. An ark ship called Enkidu tried to establish a human colony. There is bit of a mystery going on -- and that mystery really just keeps going on without getting anywhere until the end. Book is a weird format for this kind of story which I've seen previously in many scifi shows. After I figured out what was happening, there was still a whole lot of it left. I reckon you could remove about 40% of this near-500-page book without it losing any substance.
The Corvids are the most interesting part of Children of Memory but I feel there's like a conclusion missing, some realization. Tchaikovsky got a bit cheeky by using Clarke's third law format:
"Sufficiently advanced instincts are indistinguishable from intelligence."
I also wonder if Tchaikovsky's uses a thesaurus for adjectives or if they're in his regular vocabulary. I know I don't regularly see words such as: germane, affability, askance, acerbic, irascible, garrulous, shorn, or impolitic very often. I could guess some of their general meanings from their context but I had to look up most of them.
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