Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

What made a terraformer? Apparently, a willingness not to terraform if there was something more interesting around, as though they’d all come down with ADHD.

Senkovi’s personal theory was that the pressure of being in the middle of the food chain was an essential prerequisite for complex intelligence. Like humans (and like Portiid spiders, had he only known), octopuses had developed in a world where they were both hunter and hunted. Top predators, in Senkovi’s assessment, were an intellectual dead end.

in the core of their minds the Portiids know they are not the builders of the universe’s great web, but they dare to walk it and eavesdrop on its messages and turn it on its makers if need be.

This suspicion has survived in her despite the many forms she has taken: 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.

Aquatic cultures are not good candidates for high technology, and most especially not for spacefaring. That, at least, is Portiid received wisdom on the subject.

She has hunted for meaning, using Helena’s notes and her own problem-solving capability, but has come down to a simple conclusion: They just never shut up.

And that in itself is a miracle; that is the grand triumph Senkovi never grasped, that his creatures could empathize, could apply a theory of mind to entities quite unlike themselves, could be great-hearted enough to be happy that someone else was laughing, even if they couldn’t get the joke.

This, then, is octopus governance: an assembly of whoever feels inclined to turn up, organized into dozens of factions whose boundaries are infinitely permeable—literal floating voters moving from one allegiance to another constantly without their disloyalty being seen as anything exceptional or worthy of shame.

so much of human rhetoric is based on creating a false certainty—weaving fictions together so closely they can be presented as contiguous fact.

The species is the very definition of open-minded. They may unleash hell at any moment, but they are still listening.

There’s always another way. Even for you.”

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.

A makeshift syringe, that drill:

Parallels/copies last book

To the octopuses, however, space is an ocean—save that the concept of “ocean” is a very different thing to them than it is to humanity: a great many-dimensional canvas that surrounds them, and that they can manipulate and open up, to see if anything edible can be found within.