Children of Ruin Quotes

“We’re going on an adventure.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Advance science as far as you like, the human mind continued to place itself at the centre of the universe.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“evolution had gifted them with a profoundly complex toolkit for taking the world apart to see if there was a crab hiding under it.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Despite the barriers to communication, they have developed an idiolect of their own, mostly devoted to complaining.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“An inclination to play God was part and parcel of wanting to go out and terraform other worlds, but good practice was to at least play nicely with the rest of the pantheon.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Ah well, the key failing with tigers is that their performance drops off sharply when you get them to mend coolant pipes a kilometre below the surface of the ocean.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“The octopus knew he was happy, and it loved him, or valued him, or felt something enough that his happiness was important to it. 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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“The entire elaborate operation looked good on paper to anyone who didn’t suspect he’d gone through it solely because he wanted more space for fishtanks.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“We’re going on an adventure,”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“The whole audacious, ridiculous plan of his had worked out in every particular, save that he had failed to adjust for the destructive stupidity of the rest of humanity.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Complex life was merely the recent froth over a great vat of prokaryotes feeding and dividing and dying.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“In his own mind, Senkovi was known for his sense of humour, an organ that in truth amused only himself.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“His life had been punctuated by horrible awakenings, in and out of cold sleep as the ark ship conducted its centuries-long odyssey. Each time he had found himself in another time, another world, less fit for human habitation. That was what the nightmares were about: not the cold itself, which was only a trigger. Not even that he might not wake, though that had been a real possibility with the Gilgamesh’s failing life support. He feared waking once more into a world he didn’t understand, where everyone else had rushed ahead and left him behind.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“the mind is like an ant’s nest, individual neurons, like ant workers, weighing in on either side of any given issue until a tipping point is reached and the brain, or the colony, thinks, I have made a decision and here (post facto) are my rational reasons.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“There is an Old Earth phrase Kern used sometimes, about a boat whose every part was replaced, and was it the same boat then?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“The acerbic computer helpfully attaches a legend identifying just which pieces of the wreckage are Meshner and Fabian, because she always has computing power for put-downs.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“The sun filtered down through the waters like an embarrassment of sapphires”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Had there been faint scratchings from other terraforming sites? Had there been a hiss and a whisper from Old Earth? He had realized eventually that he could no longer tell, and the Aegean could not distinguish signal from noise. If he listened to the background murmur of the universe for long enough it became a song to which he could fit any words he wanted.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Of course there was an inescapable fate for such men, or what was hubris for?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“...if you had a slightly deranged genius on the team it was probably better to let him cox than row.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“a whole angry planet with such a level of technology that wouldn’t just destroy itself. Like Earth did. As though there is some millennia-old curse that follows all the children of that lost planet and goads them into annihilation.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Because in a very real way the ecosystem was the basic unit of life: species creating, by their very presence, an environment for other species to work in.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“She wants—or at least has constructed a hypothesis to which she is giving untoward weight—it to be something like her, or like she was. She is aware that she is stacking the deck of her own calculations to get the answer she wants. At the same time, it is the answer she wants, and so she agrees with herself to overlook her own fudging of the figures just this once.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“An ancestress of hers stole the Sacred Eye of the Messenger from the ants, back when the ants were the great power in the world and not merely a convenient operating system to run Avrana Kern on.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“What can be so urgent? Some of the crew always think of war, when it comes down to this, but what war? What is there to fight over, in a universe that is bigger than even we can ever exhaust, with more of anything than we could ever need?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“probably there would be other names in footnotes, or immortalized as geographical features. Mount Senkovi . . . or maybe not. Sounds like an instruction to a taxidermist.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“if Salome succeeds in overriding the safeties then they will both find themselves outside, meaning miles over the surface of Damascus along with the rapidly dispersing watery environment currently sustaining them, and with about the same chance of survival as a bowl of petunias placed in the same predicament.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

“Because he liked octopi, he did, but they had always been pets. Try as he might, travel as many light years as they were, he had not left that part of him behind. 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.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin