Tchaikovsky's octopuses

Children of Ruin is the sequel to Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. If you liked Children of Time, I think it's a safe bet to say you'd like Children of Ruin.

I'm not going to talk about writing craft or the plot or even what I liked best. Instead I'm going to talk about the octopuses. Portiid spiders were what came into their own in Children of Time; it's octopuses in this book.

Tchaikovsky does a breathtaking job conveying such an alien form of intelligence--an individual octopus isn't...