Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

We know better ways of doing things, we say. You can’t do the things the way you were. You have to do them like this: more efficient, more rational. And why wouldn’t they, when their children starve and their world grows barren? Then, in the end, all the ways they had and the traditions that arose from them, everything that made them what they were, is gone, and they’ve just become an imitation of us.’

‘What you want,’ she says disgustedly, ‘is a zoo where you can come and look at the exhibits in their natural habitat. But what are you really preserving, then? Nothing except a means to sate your curiosity. You’re not doing it for them, at that point. Just for you.’