Children of Memory

This is the third -- and I believe final -- installment in Adrian Tchaikovsky's acclaimed Children of Time series.

The action once again moves on to another alien world but with many of the same characters and species from the earlier two books. And of course we are introduced to additional new intelligences, as you'd expect from the earlier stories' trajectories.

However it took me well over half the book to really get into it. The multiple plots seemed not only hard to keep track of, but self-contradictory at times as well. Eventually everything does fall into place and there are enough plot twists to keep you intrigued right to the end, but there were definitely times when I had to force myself to keep reading as the frustration was starting to get too much.

I'm glad I kept going, though. In the last third of the book many of the earlier confusion gets resolved, and that's what's bumped it up from a three-star to a four-star review.

It is ultimately a good book in the end, although it's definitely more openly philosophical and introspective than the previous two. If you like Tchaikovsky's work and are prepared to stick with it, this is rewarding.

"They think."
"Not thinking like us, though."
"Well that's to be expected."

Minor spoilers below about the basic conceit of the series/novel

Children of Memory is the third novel in the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It follows in the footsteps of the first two books by giving us another story about characters (various uplifted species, human/AI constructs and one fungi species) being thrust together onto another planet.

As per usual, hijinks ensue.

Spoilers how the story is told

I think that the two previous books had better pacing and were more interesting rollercoaster rides. This one isn't bad per say but I didn't like it as much. The story is told out of order and that's usually a hard sell for me (although I did appreciate being told when/where the chapters were taking place in the timeline).

Children of Memory fell a little flat for me because I prefer novels that don't withhold information from the reader to inject mystery and intrigue into a story instead of just telling an interesting story in the first place. Children of Memory feels more like an M. Night. Shyamalan movie this time around.

More spoilers ahead

Withholding a bit of information is fine as long as the story being told holds up on its own without the reader knowing about the "twist". There's a few chapters that feel pretty miserable to read because they're sort of remixes of previous chapters (the child POV also didn't really help with this). At times it felt like Adrian was padding out the page count instead of trying to tell an interesting story.

Overall, I enjoyed reading through Children of Memory. I applaud it for being a little avant garde in terms of how the story is told but I'm not sure that it completely sticks the landing.

If you're a fan of the series or you're interested in unpacking some of the philosophical questions raised by the book, I can recommend it.

"You don't think what they have here, their culture, their traditions, is worth preserving?" Miranda asks, because to her it absolutely is. It's different, and difference is the only resource the universe is short of. So much of it is just empty sameness. Life is rare, and needs to be studied and admired and encouraged to be itself."

Children of Memory is the third (and final?) book in the Children of Time saga. I have very mixed feelings about this book (and also this series). If I had to sum up my feelings, the last 50 pages of this book are absolutely excellent but the middle ~200 pages drag on for quite some time. If I had to review the series as a whole, I am glad I read these three books personally, but my recommendation for others who hadn't read any would be to read the first book and stop there.

One thing I think this series does well is that each book has a very different vibe overall. Book one is very space opera / evolutionary theater, book two adds in a significant horror element, and book three feels more like a mystery (fairytale?) of strange contradictory events. I strongly agree with Tak, who described this third book as Locked Tomb-esque.

The technological development arc in this series reminders me a little of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past series. By book three of each of these series, the technology level has just gone so far into post-human / galaxy teleporting / immortality / body uploads / consciousness-splitting developments that it almost feels disconnecting to me as a reader. What are the desires and needs of people who live like this even like? I think this book gets into some of what that might be, but in both of these series I found it harder to connect with characters as time went on.

Similar to the previous two books in this series, which each have their own featured uplifted animal, this book also brings in some extremely smart corvids. Other characters are not sure what to make of them and spend a lot of time trying to figure out if they are sentient or not. (The birds say they are absolutely not.) I found the birds Gothi and Gethli to be very endearing characters. I love love loved the small interstitial chapters where they are wittily talking to each other and making jokes. I felt like it nailed "birds are really interested in shiny new things and uninterested in everything else" angle as well as the "corvids are both extremely chatty and smart" one.

This book also adds a lot of good development for characters from book one and book two. I like that we get to see extra sides of Kern(s), as well as a significant perspective from a character who is Those-of-We trying to be a Human named Miranda that they knew specifically. They're coping with the tension of wanting to know everything, with being a terrible entity in the past that they're ashamed of, with various emotional traumas, and with the stress of pretending to be one thing when really they are many many things at once. I felt like the book two perspective on Those-of-We was necessarily limited and I was glad that book three has a chance to let them shine.

I feel like any discussion of the end of the book is going to be extremely full of major spoilers, so I will leave that in a follow-up comment. Suffice it to say that I felt like the ending to this book was as solid (if not more solid) than book one and really tied together everything that the book put out there in a satisfying way.

I am afraid I am going to have to be a little hard here and say this barely scraped 4 stars for me. The middle really dragged. I can't really explain why without going into spoilers (which I am not a fan of doing in reviews). I will say that there wasn't the same sense of progress that you got from the first two books. A sense of something new developing. The middle third is very focused on a (to all appearances) regressive setting, thus the sense of the new wasn't there for me for a good chunk of this read.
The ideas are still top tier. The book started well and the ending was satisfying. Maybe it needed a tighter edit, maybe I was just not in the right place for this.
Still, it is Tchaikovsky and my reservations could just be a me thing. It's still at least a 4 star for me so I can definitely recommend it. Especially if you enjoyed the first two in the series.