Reviews

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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bex_knighthunterbooks's review against another edition

adventurous challenging mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This was different enough to the previous books to not be repetitive, but clearly part of the group, and again I really loved this. It explores similar themes of consciousness, sentience, and personhood all through multiple different lenses and perspectives. My favourite parts of this were on the colony, with the hardship and colonists turning against each other offset by Miranda and Liff's hopeful and curious perspectives. I also loved seeing Miranda's character develop and evolve since the previous book with a real sense of duty and ethics that was so interesting. I also really enjoyed trying to puzzle out what was going on. It's a very twisty book (more so than the previous two in the series), which I did enjoy although by the end I was starting to lose track of the threads. Boundaries of weird aliens were stretched even further in this novel with multiple new additions, including the Corvids, and another I won't name here, which continue to each be utterly unique and well drawn. One down side is that I do feel the ending was overlong after we moved off the main section of the colony, and I was occasionally impatient to get back to the colony from the flashback perspectives. However, overall this was really enjoyable and thought provoking.

catsnflags's review

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adventurous challenging mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

mommahag's review

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adventurous challenging mysterious fast-paced

3.75

zainabsaba's review

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adventurous challenging mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.5

dwest77's review against another edition

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2.0

I really enjoyed the first book in this series. Children of Time was a masterclass in building a world from first principles, watching how civilisation evolved in an entirely novel way. The encounters and battles were engaging and held weight, I cared what happened.

The second book was a pretty good followup, but felt more bloated this time and packed too heavily with metaphor so much that trying to get through to the story and the meaning behind everything felt like cutting through a jungle with a machete.

This final book accentuated everything bad about the second book, and if I didn't know better I'd say whatever held the author back in the first two books was let go entirely here and Adrian was allowed to run rampant. The story is still pretty good but it's buried under a mountain of word salad, metaphor and confusion. I get that with this book the point is to be confusing, but the middle and later sections go right past confusing and straight into incoherent. From one chapter to the next there's no sense of continuity at all, no weight or impact to anything because it all seemed like meaningless drivel. I took a break and read 18 other books before returning right where I left off with no real loss of perspective, because aside from the general gist I had no clue what was even going on. Yes the reveals at the end are great, satisfactorily subverting my expectations, but my god you had to work to get through them. At the end of it all the entire world building is so far beyond what any human can relate to it just all feels meaningless. How can you care about anyone if you can have infinite undying versions of everything. I'm honestly surprised that every entity in the entire universe didn't just morph into a homogenous combination of every species we've seen and that the universe or at least this extent of it was occupied by a single character. Of course that character would have to be Avrana bloody Kern.

Adrian has produced some of my favourite sci fi stories and I'll always have a place in my heart for them, but honestly this book is everything bad about his style turned up to 11 then blared through a speaker the size of a planet.

sizezero's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

ornithopter1's review against another edition

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4.0

Quite an esoteric piece of sf. Complicated and layers-deep, if its narrative is a deck of cards, then this story has been shuffled and re-shuffled into something far less linear than one would usually expect. Were it in any other author's hands it would be a damnable mess. Tchaikovsky on the other hand somehow manages to just about hold together the through-line, keeping things (mostly) comprehensible. It's not the easiest of reads and it's not the most comfortable either. I'm not sure how much existential horror the author intended here, but I was uneasy when reading the middle bulk of the story. The fractured narrative had a wrongness to it that was pervasive. The implications of the consciousness-versus-complexity musings it tries to tackle are at times uncomfortable to acknowledge too. That said, the fact I reacted to it as strongly as I did shows it had a pull on me.

This third book doesn't entirely mesh with the prior novels in the same series. Were it not for the continuity brought by the Miranda and Kern personalities, I'd say this ought not to have been parcelled into the same series at all. It shares the same exploration of that which is alien which we saw tackled by the earlier novels. True. Here though, the alienness is so utterly alien as to mess with the narrative structure of the book itself. The focus of its scrutiny even looks out to the reader and challenges them to question their own nature. That’s heady stuff indeed. It's an order of magnitude beyond the rest of the series and, in terms of enjoyment, it suffers because of its obfuscations.

I enjoyed it, but it was only late in the day that I could honestly say that. Much of the book (deliberately) doesn't make sense. I don't mind admitting it was a frustrating reading experience. It's a good book but it's one I feel would have benefitted from foreknowledge that it was going to be an arduous, splintered journey. Of the three 'Children of …' novels this one was definitely the weakest. It's a unique story nevertheless and, judged on it's own merits, it's worthy of attention. Elements are exemplary, others are lacking. I keep coming back to the plot: it just doesn’t really work in a satisfying way. But I can’t fault its ambition. Overall, I’m reluctant to say this is a clear 4-star book. That 4th star is dimmed, and you might have to squint a bit harder to see it than in the prior books in the series, but the quality is there still.