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Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

Adrian Tchaikovsky,

Mel Hudson (Narrator)

Start date: May 1, 2019

Finish date: May 31, 2019

Discussion: SciFi

Why we're reading this: Featured buddy read-May 2019
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What Members Thought

May 12, 2020 Nataliya rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020-reads, favorites

“You expand our world. We cure your singularity. Isn’t that a good?”

I do think that Children of Ruin is actually even better than its predecessor Children of Time — more complex, more nuanced, more far-reaching — but it is not as easy to like or to binge as the first book. I am a compulsive binge-reader, and even I needed to get through this one in several chunks. But in the end, in that end that I definitely did not anticipate (after all, I’m human, not Human), it was all more than worth it

“You expand our world. We cure your singularity. Isn’t that a good?”

“They don’t even know what they want! But she reminds herself that is an anthropocentric universe speaking. They want many things. Human neurology works the same way, after all, with conflicting urges and drives bubbling away beneath the surface. Perhaps for these creatures those impulses are literally on the surface all the time.”

It’s tempting to reduce it to just Children of Time but with octopuses (not octopi. I checked). To chuckle at Tchaikovsky’s choice of different eight-appendaged creatures that are so very different from our human understandings, and whom we can eventually come to respect as fellow sentient life forms who are persons without needing to be human.

But that’s way too reductive here.

Despite all of its complexity, Children of Time was overall a straightforward story of an inevitable conflict and eventual understanding between a civilization of sentient spiders unintentionally “uplifted“ by an engineered nanovirus and the remnants of human civilization desperately needing another planet after Earth became uninhabitable. Oh, and also let’s not forget Avrana Kern who underwent the unlikely transformation “from human to human-AI hybrid to pure AI (that believed itself human) through to a complex program running on an organic operating system arising out of the interactions of millions of ants.” Simple, yeah? And it was clear that spiders were the ones to root for, and humans only if they would find a way to coexist with those they used to think of as monsters.

Children of Ruin turns it up a new notches. Now we still have sentient Portiid spiders relying on their “Understandings” (genetic memories) and nanovirus-enhanced Humans forging a still somewhat tentative alliance with the more dominant spider civilization, and with a bit more critical look at the less pleasant things about spiders’ trends towards posturing and gender discrimination (it’s oppressive matriarchy here that is a problem).

But we also have a look back in time to a very unlucky terraforming team on another planet who have to quickly adjust their plans after realizing that “They were the first humans to set eyes on something that had evolved on another world and owed nothing to Earth.”:

“You know what they were calling the terraforming initiative, when we left Earth orbit? The Forever Project. Because this is it. This is when the human race becomes immortal, you get me? We’re off Earth. We’re making new homes amongst the stars, whether the stars want us or not. We have godlike power. People will come here, expecting to find a home. They’ll be properly impressed by the jellyfish and the moving rocks and thing-what, but then they’ll start asking awkward questions like, ‘Which house is mine, then?’ I mean, you know people. We all do. Moan, moan, demand, demand, ‘We came thirty light years and you’re showing us pictures of tidal marshland.’”

We also get to see a new emerging (and even more alien to us) society of octopuses with their decentralized nervous systems making their cognition so unbelievably alien and alienating. After all, “evolution had gifted them with a profoundly complex toolkit for taking the world apart to see if there was a crab hiding under it.”

“Paul solves problems like a wizard: a thought, a desire, and his Reach extends to fulfil it. Sometimes this means a fight, where intimate contact between his arms and another’s imposes dominance and simultaneously passes information from Reach to Reach, a whole black market of calculating power that Paul and his peers don’t even know they have. In this partnership, each entity a committee, they get things done.”

“And of course as their Crowns trumpet their defiance of each other, their Reaches interlock and fight for dominance, eight separate calculating engines per octopus running in networked parallel, expressing pure maths and logistics by way not just of tentacles but the muscles of individual suction cups, a perfectly evolved engine of rational expression serving the tumultuous whims of the brain.”

And add to that Avrana Kern, who is still with us, “Kern—or the semi-biological computer system that identified as Kern”, who may or may not somewhat miss the time when she could feel emotions as a human being many millennia ago.

“Avrana Kern has only limited and artificial emotional responses, being dead and a computer composed at least partially of ants.”

“Vitriol, ah, I remember that. It feels good to be scathing and unpleasant again.”

And finally, the *really* alien life of the planet Nod; These-of-We that slowly but surely become a threat to any life. Anywhere. They just want to go on an adventure — the words that are bound to give you nightmares after this book.

“One day it finds itself on some far orb, utterly alone despite all its plurality, every possible variation of its archives plumbed, the stars still out of reach, knowing only that it has encountered cultures and civilizations and individuals of indescribable difference and diversity, and made them all into its own image. It is a child reaching for a soap bubble in innocent wonder, and finding only an oily residue on its hands, and the world cheapened and coarsened. And it weeps, if such a thing can weep. Perhaps, by then and after so many bodies, it has finally learned.”

And all of this comes together in strange and unexpected ways, through emotions and visuals and marine habitats in space and web-based spaceships and cross-species contamination.

And it initially doesn’t seem to really work as a cohesive whole — until suddenly it does.

It does so well.
————————

The uniting theme of this book is the power of curiosity and how far the desire to know, to explore, to feel can take you. Curiosity — and communication, without which destruction can and will be rampant. Well, and the desire for understanding and empathy, no matter how hard it may be, in this universe full of people and spiders and octopuses and apparently corvids, and alien slime, and artificial intelligence and who knows what else. All who can coexist and explore together and learn.

“Tell them this…” And Kern speaks: the intentions of an alien culture, filtered through a once-human computer now rapidly running out of thinking room, through a Portiid spider, through a Human and into the world of the cephalopods that even now have their arms about the trigger.”

“Only by accepting the other can it truly find diversion and inspiration; only by allowing the universe to be separate from it can it have the infinite variety it craves.”

And the final note: please be careful before allowing your pet octopus play video games. It may lead to unintended consequences.

“But then, when you’re designing an interface to let molluscs play computer games you probably don’t build in that much security.
Baltiel had a moment to consider how that was a sequence of words he’d never expected to be relevant in his life.”

Excellently done. Brilliantly executed.
And I read the entire Wikipedia article on octopuses. And learned their proper plural. Double win.

5 stars.
—————

“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.”

...more

187 likes · Like · see review

May 22, 2019 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: space-opera, 2019-shelf, sci-fi, fanboy-goes-squee, worldbuilding-sf

I admit that I was afraid that this might not have turned out as good ... as brilliant ... as the Children of Time, but now that I've read it, I'm happy to say that I'm very happy indeed.

We left our spider/human crew off to explore new worlds and peoples and guess what they found?

A new world and multiple alien species. :) We have all the goodness of Dr. Kern, her ants, the Portias, and the human crew stumbling face first into a free-for-all (or close enough), reacting very badly to the news tha I admit that I was afraid that this might not have turned out as good ... as brilliant ... as the Children of Time, but now that I've read it, I'm happy to say that I'm very happy indeed.

We left our spider/human crew off to explore new worlds and peoples and guess what they found?

A new world and multiple alien species. :) We have all the goodness of Dr. Kern, her ants, the Portias, and the human crew stumbling face first into a free-for-all (or close enough), reacting very badly to the news that HUMANS had come.

*facepalm* Of course. Fortunately, it only gets better from here. We have two timelines and several generations to catch up with, beginning with human terraformers making mistakes, playing with making new life, AGAIN, or I should say, AS USUAL, and never quite making the required leap between keeping control on their projects and throwing caution to the wind. This sequence was fascinating as hell to me. If you love squiddies, you're going to love this novel. I did. :)

When we get to the linguistics and math and just trying to salvage a real clusterpluck of several first-contact scenarios with what SHOULD have been a great starting point with what we already accomplished with intelligent spiders and humans, I really got the feeling like this was shaping up to be a full-on horror novel. I kept thinking about Greg Bear's Blood Music. With all the cool bits intact. And my goodness, I fell head-over-heels. The squiddies are like what a civilization would be like if all you had was the squabbling vibrancy of the best and worst features of our internet turned into a full-on species. Crank it up, make them intelligent but too passionate and flighty for their own good, and you might get a pretty neat idea about what we're dealing with. :)

I love it. :)

This is one of the more original SF novels to come out in a long time along with the Children of Time. In a long line of novels that all seem to be riffing on mostly the self-same themes, these two books break so many molds and fly so very high above the rest. :)

Tchaikovsky put heart and soul into these and for that, I salute him. :) FANTASTIC IDEAS RUN RAMPANT! :) :) :) ...more

132 likes · Like · see review

May 24, 2019 Justine rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019-read, audiobook, 2024-read, rereads

2024 reread - 4 stars
Reread via audiobook, which was very well done, and with the same narrator as Children of Time.

To be plain, this is a very good book, but I do think it suffers slightly in comparison to Children of Time, which I reread last month. It has a deeply complex story and is chock full of original ideas. It’s missing the solid character development of the first book that I loved so much, but I think to be fair, the first book is sui generis and any sequel won’t quite offer the same ...more

36 likes · Like · see review

May 22, 2019 Trish rated it it was amazing

Space. The final frontier. These are the ongoing adventures of the space spiders! Yay!

This is the sequel to The Children of Time in which we followed some humans escaping the war on Earth and searching for a potential new habitat for the human race. They found a suitable planet but then there was an accident resulting in a virus on board the human vessel landing on said planet and infecting the local population of arachnids - who subsequently became much more intelligent and therefore advanced f Space. The final frontier. These are the ongoing adventures of the space spiders! Yay!

This is the sequel to The Children of Time in which we followed some humans escaping the war on Earth and searching for a potential new habitat for the human race. They found a suitable planet but then there was an accident resulting in a virus on board the human vessel landing on said planet and infecting the local population of arachnids - who subsequently became much more intelligent and therefore advanced faster than their normal evolution would have allowed.

Now, in this second installment, we see the Portias and other arachnids many generations later as they are technologically advanced enough to have space travel. We also see the digital version of Dr. Kern again.
And we follow a different group of humans as they look for and then try to terraform another planet only to wake something that has been slumbering there and which is, shall we say, very friendly. As in it wants to be with everybody and go on an adventure with them even more than Bilbo Baggins. *lol* I have to wait until my paperback copy is here to find the exact quote but believe me: it's hilarious. They want to be friends and their chosen friends don't get a say in it.
Add to that the molluscs (think octopus) that one of the human scientists started breeding and you have half a zoo!
So there is cross contamination and body horror galore.

Moreover, we get space exploration through the portias following a signal from a human vessel to where the terraformers, their molluscs, and the friendly neighbourhood invaders are.

So how can this three-sided first contact go? Horribly horribly wrong.
But, just like in the first novel, we follow more than one generation and just because it ended in disaster once doesn't mean one should give up. Thus, we get linguistics and maths and threats of extinction for more than one species. We also get more information on the cataclysmic event back on Earth of which we heard so little in the first book.

Honestly, this is the perfect example why a sequel doesn't have to be worse than the previous book. Tchaikovsky is indeed a master at intelligent and yet still funny science fiction that is filled with interesting beings. I say beings because we follow so many individulas that it's not like you can stay with one for too long (well, except Dr. Kern, of course). But we already had that multi-generational character in Portia in book 1 and it's not much different here and because it's such a unique way of thinking of an "individual", it's a joy to follow these four species through their generations - to see them build entire civilizations and fuck them up so well and good that they collapse again, only to prevent total annihilation through scientific genius last-minute and actually learn (yes, it IS possible).

The writing style, too, was once again very uplifting (yes, despite the carnage), the viewpoints and twists exceedingly well done and the overall reading experience thus rather magnificent. As was the audio version of the book.

Total recommendation for anyone who loves scifi for being "out there" and "different" while still being recognizable in a way that makes you feel right at home.

...more

35 likes · Like · see review

Jun 06, 2019 Cathy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2024

Re-read, in audio again. As I knew the story already, I wasn‘t so focused on the surface narration, but listened more to the characters and their thoughts and was a lot more invested in the alien lifeform. I also liked Kern a lot more this time around. She did a good job.
Still, next time I should probably eye read this…

🐙🕷️🐙🕷️🐙

*+*+*
My review from June 2019:

In case you wonder over the course of this book, the word octopus has three possible plurals:
Plural 1: the octopuses
Plural 2: the octopi
Pl ...more

29 likes · Like · see review

May 23, 2019 Lindsay rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Children of Time was an awesome achievement of a book, chronicling the rise of a non-human intelligent species (nano-machine modified portia spiders) over centuries and their eventual contact with humans. It ended with a tantalizing epilogue, skipping another few centuries into the future to the point where humans, spiders and an uploaded partly-organic AI depart their world on a mission of discovery to the stars aboard the Voyager. "Spider Trek" as it were.

The story starts with the deep history ...more

23 likes · Like · see review

Jun 01, 2019 Lata rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: x2019-read, sf-f-h

In Children of Time, we watched the development of spiders over many, many generations, into technologically advanced, capable creatures in charge of their planet. Then the humans arrived on a generation ship, and after some effort, the two created a different and productive arrangement.
This book follows a different set of humans who have arrived at a planet to begin terraforming it. They discover that this planet already has life on it, and relocate their efforts to a sister planet in the syste ...more

11 likes · Like · see review

Jun 01, 2020 Liam || Books 'n Beards rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020, science-fiction, bought-2019, owned-books

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. TL;DR: 5/5, best book about schizophrenic octopuses you'll ever read.

Children of Time is one of my favourite ever books, let alone within science fiction. I think I picked it out of a Specfic Buddy Reads lineup because I recognised the author from his Shadows of the Apt series, but I wasn't expecting anything special - and what I got was one of the most inventive, thoughtful pieces of science fiction I've ever read.

I was also 100% happy for it to remain as a solo novel, so when I found out that TL;DR: 5/5, best book about schizophrenic octopuses you'll ever read.

Children of Time is one of my favourite ever books, let alone within science fiction. I think I picked it out of a Specfic Buddy Reads lineup because I recognised the author from his Shadows of the Apt series, but I wasn't expecting anything special - and what I got was one of the most inventive, thoughtful pieces of science fiction I've ever read.

I was also 100% happy for it to remain as a solo novel, so when I found out that there was a sequel I was slightly concerned. How could it match the brilliance of book 1?

The answer is that it doesn't - nothing can match the surprise and joy that I experienced when I first read Children of Time. However, Children of Ruin is brilliant and despite the heavy expectations I placed on it, exceeded those expectations.

Happening both after and in parallel with Children of Time, Children of Ruin follows another crew of humans sent to terraform a planet and their misadventures discovering what amounts to a sentient biological virus a-la Halo's Flood which infects and commandeers any life it comes into contact with in its endless quest for new experiences and knowledge.

Meanwhile, old mate Senkovi in orbit has a fascination with octopuses and adds some of the accelerated intelligence nanovirus which is responsible for the spiders from Children of Time to their tank, hey presto octopus society.

What follows is an exploratory crew of Portiids (spiders) and Humans from Kern's World arriving to investigate the system, and finding it full of sentient octopuses. Drama ensues.

Tchaikovsky really outdid himself with characterising the new 'aliens' in Ruin, both the octopuses and, in the end, the virus/parasite/'Flood'. The octopuses are a swirling, schizophrenic mess of constantly shifting thoughts and emotions due to their decentralised mental structure which made them very interesting and unpredictable as characters, and truly alien to begin with - though they do become more clear and understandable the longer you spend with them.

The Flood (as I'm going to call them as they aren't named in the book) are possibly even more human, despite how vague and confusing they are for the first half of the book - in the end, they are truly tragic and sympathetic, while at the same time being quite repulsive. They ended up being far more relatable in their thought processes than the octopuses, because whilst they were an alien hive mind, in their end their only desire was to expand their knowledge and experience. I think Tchaikovsky was trying to say something about humanity with them.

The epilogue was very intriguing, hinting at yet more intelligent Earth animal species and a posthuman universe where consciousness can be split and uploaded at will - which, considering Tchaikovsky's clear ability to be absolutely brilliant, is very promising.

When - if - there's a third book, I will go in with no reservations, and even higher expectations.

And I'm sure it will surpass even those. ...more

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May 26, 2019 Linda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019, audio

This sequel was just as good as the first. Not only are there spideys and humans (er...I mean Humans) on this interstellar voyage, but also other friends are along for the ride this time. I loved the evolution of both additional species, but especially one in particular added some delightfully creepy and horror-like scenes that pleased me immensely.

Audiobook narrated by Mel Hudson.

9 likes · Like · see review

May 29, 2019 Vavita rated it it was amazing

I don't like sci fi books and I don't like second parts. Still I find that this book is as amazing as the first one!
What a joy to read it! ...more

9 likes · Like · see review

Aug 12, 2019 Jorid Sørli rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobook

I loved the first one, but this was confusing.

4 likes · Like · see review

Feb 03, 2023 Leticia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, r-fantasy-bingo-challenge-2022, 2023-bingo, around-the-year-in-52-books

Trust this brilliant author to reinvent his narrative colours with every book, he is a surprising writing chameleon (or octopus)! :-)

2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 29, 2024 Victor Gutierrez rated it it was amazing

5/5 Stars.

In some aspects, I liked this better than the first novel. Namely, the horror elements in it (mild spoiler?). Case in point: "We're going on an adventure," if you know you know.

The tone was much bleaker than that of the first novel while retaining the same grand scope. Here the pacing was closer to that of a thriller, with the story having a stronger feeling of urgency and stakes than in the first novel.
...more

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