Phenomenal follow-up to the award winning Children of Time! This one slows the pace down a bit, but not in a bad way. There's much more political maneuvering and different factions jockeying for position in what is to eventually come. High tech brilliance coupled with aliens that are so originally crafted, you really need to read this series if you call yourself a sf fan. Tchaikovsky is one of the best in the business. My recommendation is to read all of his stuff because he's brilliant. Just a wonderful sequel that I won't soon forget!

I requested a digital copy in order to sample the prose on my phone (since I don't have a eReader) before requesting a physical copy for review. My review will be based on the physical ARC I read (if I qualify)

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Clarke Award-winning Children of Time is one of my favourite sci-fi novels. When it was announced that he was going to revisit the setting (it was originally meant as a stand-alone, I believe), it was music to my ears. The story is comprised of two threads — one sort-of parallel to the first novel (“past”) and also a continuation of that story (“present”). A substantial tale of exploration, hubris, and contact with others, this is a very good read.

The novel starts far away from Kern’s World, the setting of Children of Time. It is clear, however, that we are in the same universe. We’re with the crew of another terra-forming mission, who have arrived at their destination system, and are planning to get started. Humanity is attempting to spread out across the universe, to create new homes and space away from the damaged Earth. The crew has been travelling for a long time, and their cynicism has ratcheted up a couple of notches (or, perhaps, this is why they were sent on the mission…).

“You know what they were calling the terraforming initiative, when we left Earth orbit? The Forever Project. Because this is it. This is when the human race becomes immortal, you get me? We’re off Earth. We’re making new homes amongst the stars, whether the stars want us or not. We have godlike power. People will come here, expecting to find a home. They’ll be properly impressed by the jellyfish and the moving rocks and thing-what, but then they’ll start asking awkward questions like, ‘Which house is mine, then?’ I mean, you know people. We all do. Moan, moan, demand, demand, ‘We came thirty light years and you’re showing us pictures of tidal marshland.’”

In addition to the exploratory crew members, there are also the techies. One of whom, Senkovi, is engaged in some unsanctioned (or, officially-unsanctioned-but-indulged) experiments with octopi. Tchaikovsky’s fondness for other creatures really comes through again in Children of Ruin, when he’s writing about the octopi and their shenanigans (they’re delightfully mischievous and playful). This aspect of the novel allows for some excellent, light humour. I’d be amazed if you came away from this not wanting one of your own…

Pavlovian motivation wasn’t terribly useful for training an octopus. Once they were fed, food became a lesser motivator than curiosity. Also, when Senkovi had contrived to communicate that the game hid a shrimp inside it somehow, Paul 2 had broken the game trying to take it apart.

As can be expected, things start to go wrong after an encounter on one of the planets the crew are intending on terraforming. I won’t spoil anything, but it is a version of classic first contact suspense/horror. As events spiral towards catastrophe, the story starts alternating between the Past and Present, and we become reacquainted with the arachnid race from Kern’s World, as well as their human companions — the two have developed and continued to evolve in parallel, although there are also plenty of humans who have sequestered themselves away from their Portiid fellows.

I very much enjoyed the continued development of Portiid society and technology — they and the humans are working on different ways of improving communication and knowledge sharing (to varying degrees of success and comfort). That these scientists and technologists are part of the expedition to investigate the signals they have received proves both problematic and fortuitous, as the story unfolds. All of the characters –human or otherwise — are well-rounded and three-dimensional, and often endearing. You root for their successes and continued survival. I never thought I’d care so much about spiders or octopi…

This is a novel of exploration, evolution, hubris, and how disparate cultures and races can find common cause. It is a story told on a grand scale and timeline. It is intelligent, imaginative, engaging, entertaining, and thought-provoking. If you enjoyed Children of Time, then I would certainly recommend you read this follow-up. If you haven’t read the first, then I would urge you to remedy this ASAP. Both of these are superb science fiction novels.

Another fantastic, must-read novel from Tchaikovsky.

I ran out of time to finish the first book and won’t be reviewing this second book since I can’t do it justice. Thank you for the chance to review!

When I approached this novel’s predecessor, Children of Time, I did so with some apprehension, since I’m mildly arachnophobic and the main characters in that story were indeed spiders: imagine my surprise when Adrian Tchaikovsky’s writing not only made my fear a moot point, but compelled me to root unabashedly for the eight-legged heroes of his saga…

The previous novel ended with a hint that there could be further territory to explore in this universe, whose most fascinating element comes from the fact that uplifted creatures are now the more populous, more advanced species, and mankind is still struggling with the aftermath of its civilization’s end. Children of Ruin starts where book 1 ended, with a mixed group of scientist - arachnids and humans - embarked on a voyage of discovery for new frontiers.

Like book 1, this sequel follows two different timelines: the ‘present’ aboard the ship Voyager with its mixed crew, and the more remote past, where a group of terraformers has to deal with the collapse of human civilization and the realization that they might be all that is left of mankind. With a storyline that somewhat parallels that of the evolution of new intelligence on Kern’s World, home of the spiders, one of the scientists on the ship Aegean uses Dr. Kern’s uplift virus on his octopus specimens to create a viable race for the water world he’s focusing on, thus creating a new intelligent species.

As eager as I was to learn more about the arachnid-human association and their journey of exploration, together with the marvels of the organic ship they traveled on, Children of Ruin did not work for me as well as the first book in the series did, partly because of what I perceived as a form of pattern repetition, and partly because of pacing problems. Still, I’d like to start with what I enjoyed in this new story.

The alliance between the survivors of mankind and the uplifted spiders is one that works but still needs to bridge many differences, chiefly where inter-species communication is involved: that was one of the most fascinating elements in this novel, with characters endeavoring to find the best approach - either simply linguistic or more mechanical - to understand each other without the mediation of the Kern personality residing in their computer. And of course there are still the compelling arachnid social dynamics, where the females assert their dominance while the males struggle to obtain recognition in what I perceived as a pointed commentary worked through an interesting role reversal.

The human terraformers offer another thought-provoking perspective, especially in their reactions after the protracted silence from Mother Earth leads them to a dismal conclusion. They all appear as self-centered individuals, more focused on their scientific goals than on building a cohesive group so far away from home - in other worlds, an echo of Avrana Kern, multiplied by five, which made me think often about the author’s overall negative vision about humanity.

Then there are the octopuses, whose journey toward increased intellect somewhat parallels that of the spiders, but of course with substantial differences due both to their nature and to the liquid environment they live in, which offers fascinating angles in the creation of their society and its evolution, both planet-side and in space. For example, there are two curious details that stuck to my mind: one is that being boneless octopuses don’t suffer from the bone deficiencies that plague spaces after a prolonged permanence in microgravity; and two, for creatures that can move in several directions, there is no concept of ‘up’ or ‘down’ to upset directional perceptions as it happens to humans.

All of the above elements intrigued me of course, together with the addition of a new kind of creature bent on assimilating other forms of life to understand them, which added further pressure on the already tense situation between octopuses and the explorers from Kern’s World. Still, the octopuses’ evolution did not feel as compelling as that of the spiders in the first novel, and there was a great deal of space dedicated to their biological and psychological progress that felt more like a textbook than a work of fiction, lacking the irresistible quality of the evolutionary saga of the arachnids. Where I cared - so surprisingly, given my bias - for the way the spiders evolved in the course of the millennia of their history, I could not feel equally engaged with the octopuses’ journey, and what’s worse I could not feel any connection with the spiders featured in this novel: this perceived remoteness on my part was the main reason I was not invested in this story as I was with the first book.

Much of my reaction could be ascribed to the lack of novelty compared with its predecessor, since I could not erase the feeling of “been there, done that” that plagued me for most of the way, and moreover the overall plot gave off the feeling of being artificially intricate, lacking the beautiful, clear progression I enjoyed with Children of Time, which does not mean I did not enjoy this story but that I feel how a more… streamlined narrative would have worked better for my tastes.

I’m glad I read this, but nonetheless I can’t avoid the consideration that sequels often thread on dangerous ground, and this one might not have always successfully avoided the pitfall of such ground.

Children of Ruin is the sequel to Children of Time which I read last year and it blew my mind to pieces. Never would have imagined I'd enjoy a harder scifi book about giant spiders but here I am reading the sequel and putting both on my favorites shelf.

IT WAS THRILLING from beginning to end, for which I have come to depend on Adrian Tchaikovky's delivering in his work. It was one part ALIEN, one part THE STARS ARE LEGION, one part THE MARTIAN, and a little bit of the film versions of ARRIVAL and ANNIHILATION all rolled into one exciting story. Adrian's work is consistently excellent -- he knows how to tell a story well, delivering plot twists and surprises along the way to keep the reader on the edge of their seat, and developing characters who are engaging and relatable. I very much enjoyed and I appreciate the deep research that went into the creation of this book.

At 600 pages, if you read only one First Contact / Space Exploration / Clash of Cultures novel this month, this may be all you have time for, but it will be time well spent. The author's first book in this series, Children of Time, won the 2016 Clarke award with its tale of the encounter between a ship bearing the remnants of humanity hoping to make a new start on a planet that had been terraformed by earlier pioneers. What they found was a planet full of uplifted arachnids, created by a mad scientist with a virus, and the end result was that humanity had to become something new in order to partner with a world of spiders.

Children of Ruin, takes place in a different star system and two-time frames, first when these  pioneers arrived to terraform a world, only to find it inhabited by life of its own, and second, in intermixed sections, a few thousand years on after the efforts of their labors have borne fruit, though not the fruit they'd hoped to harvest. In the first time frame, there's a mad scientist as well, this one obsessed with octopuses, and if the world they planned to remake has life on it, what do you think the odds are that the ice-covered world just inside the Goldilocks zone could be thawed, and uplifted octopuses find a home there?  The snake in this particular garden is that the life already in the system has a way of getting into things, and once it tastes freedom it wanst more. When an expedition from the first book, spiders, "Humans", and the AI remnant of the scientist that uplifted the spiders arrive they've got ot find a way to communicate with mollusks and microbes while not getting sucked into either's agendas.

It's a big book full of some of the most thought-provoking science fiction you'll find, and like some recent 3-hour movies, fun at the same time. The first book isn't required reading, but it may take a chapter or two before you get caught up.