4.5*, can't decide if I like this second or third best. At the halfway point I was fully invested in understanding what was going on and I loved how it didn't retread the same plot points as 1/2. But at 80% the mysteries of the world clicked into place, which was interesting for a bit, but then it felt like the last 15% hammered home the same things over and over again to a fault, to the point where I was mentally like 'enough already'. Probably a 5* book if it had been edited down by 10%.

What can I say about this modern classic? The world building, the hard scifi elements and the in depth story development made this an engrossing read from start to finish. Tchaikovsky is a legend for a reason.

Generations ago, travelers in an ark ship attempted to settle on a barely livable planet. Now, as they struggle in an increasingly untenable situation, a scientific expedition from the species of Children of Time and Children of Ruin wrestles with how to observe and understand without causing (or allowing) greater harm.

I spent the last couple weeks binge-reading the Children of Time series, and so far I've loved it. Tchaikovsky's universe-wide setting gives him room to play with different types of story while building on the sci-fi worldbuilding of previous volumes. I read Children of Time as a thriller (with sympathetic viewpoints on both sides of the first contact conflict), and Children of Ruin as sci-fi horror. Children of Memory reads to me as a sort of dream-logic puzzle box, at turns reminding me of things as recent as Harrow The Ninth (just why is this narrator so unreliable?) and as classic as Bradbury and Star Trek (how can we do ___ without violating the Prime Directive?). It's a very confusing read, but once I realized that it was that way on purpose I was able to let go and enjoy the ride.

Along the way, Tchaikovsky introduces a variety of ethical and philosophical questions for his characters to struggle with. Without getting too much into spoilers, characters and readers are asked to think about whether it's possible to interact with an isolated culture without committing cultural genocide (where the people live, but their culture is destroyed as they are assimilated into the dominate culture), what it means to be sentient/sapient, and whether everything is a simulation/does that even matter.

The whole Children of Time series is wonderful, and while I'm not sure I'd recommend smashing through it in two weeks I definitely think that sci-fi fans should check it out!

One of those books where the meaning of the title becomes apparent by the end of the book, Children of Memory is the third (and final?) volume of the Children of Time space opera from Adrian Tchaikovsky. What began as a story about the possible evolution of life from Earth on different worlds in one novel has sprawled into an epic meditation on what it means to be alive. Thanks to NetGalley and publisher Orbit for the eARC!

Spoilers for the first and second books in this review but not for this one.

The seeds of this story are planted at the end of Children of Ruin: some time after contact between the Humans/Portiids of Kern’s World and the octopuses and alien creature from the twin system of Damascus/Nod, the tenuous resulting peace has created a multispecies, interstellar, starfaring civilization. Those who want to explore set out in various types of spacecraft, usually with a mixed crew, looking for new things and new experiences—they are, as the Nod creature would put it, “having an adventure.” One such ship has arrived in orbit of another planet that was supposed to be terraformed by humans from Earth and then settled by a subsequent ark ship. They find a strange settlement that probably shouldn’t have survived this long. But as their investigation deepens, the cracks appear wider than they ever thought.

At first, the story seems to be a straightforward plot about a regressive colony being visited by a more “advanced” group of people who then have to decide what to do. Liff, an adolescent girl from the colony, serves as our interlocutor for much of the story. We watch over her shoulder as she puzzles out these newcomers. Liff is perceptive enough to recognize that these visitors are not your run-of-the-mill outsiders and young enough not to be swept up so easily in the xenophobic herd mentality promulgated by her populist uncle. Meanwhile, one of the visitors, Miranda, develops a soft spot for Liff and becomes a proponent of interfering more readily in the colony’s politics, even as her fellow explorers protest that such intervention would be useless at best and harmful at worst.

My thoughts immediately went, of course, to the Prime Directive from Star Trek. The multispecies coalition reminds me a bit of the Federation, even if it is a much less cohesive arrangement. They lack any codified Prime Directive—and indeed, as we see later in the book, interference is practically built into their mission—but many of their early actions are reminiscent of how Star Trek’s characters diligently avoid interfering in the affairs of cultures that haven’t developed faster-than-light spaceflight. Both stances are founded upon the philosophy that sufficiently advanced science does not always mean superior culture or morality, and to impose our own ideologies on other cultures that we encounter could easily lead to a recapitulation of the colonialism and imperialism that both Tchaikovsky and Roddenberry imagined as being firmly in the past of their futures.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear both to Miranda and us (and to a lesser extent, Liff) that something is terribly wrong. The story itself seems to start to break down, with continuity threatened and characterization inconsistent. The ultimate cause of this issue is not, in and of itself, all that original as far as science-fiction tropes go. Nevertheless, I like how Tchaikovsky uses it here. It’s another interesting idea to explore in this universe he has created over the past two novels. It further expands the universe—the mechanism causing this issue is alien in origin, proof of intelligent life out there beyond the creature discovered on Nod, even if that intelligence might not be living any longer. The questions raised by this discovery are profound, and Tchaikovsky’s characters treat them with the gravity they require.

Similarly, Children of Memory asks us to think critically about how we know if we are sentient and self-aware. Two central characters are a bonded pair of corvids who evolved on another failed human terraforming world (well, failed from the point of view of humans—the corvids seem quite satisfied). The corvids exhibit behaviours that seem consistent with sentience, yet they themselves admit that they don’t think they are self-aware! They’re just pretending, the same way that an AI like the currently notorious ChatGPT might pretend to self-awareness. They go so far as to assert that even humans are not, ourselves, actually self-aware either—we’re just algorithms running different software.

(The corvids’ bonded pair nature reminded me a lot of the theory of the bicameral mind, although theirs is split into cataloging and executive function. Very fascinating!)

And it’s true—can we ultimately ever prove that we are sentient beings as opposed to beings who believe we’re sentient and are good enough at faking it? This is the kind of philosophical quandary I’ve come to expect from Tchaikovsky’s writing, and he hasn’t let me down.

I saw a few other early reviews criticize the portrayal of Miranda and how Tchaikovsky reduces the Nod creature, after spending so much time humanizing it in the previous book, to a self-hating caricature of itself. I don’t agree. I think Miranda’s internalized revulsion makes a lot of sense given that she is basically a copy of a Human woman who has all the atavistic reservations about an assimilating creature like the Nod one. The whole point of the Nod creature is that it becomes what it assimilates, so if it assimilates things that feel revulsion or hatred towards it—even subconsciously—of course it will feel those things too. That’s what makes the conflict, Miranda’s characterization, so interesting. She believes she might be responsible somehow for everything that is happening—and in a way she’s right, but in another way she is also so, so wrong.

As far as pacing goes, I will admit that the first half of the book felt like it was slow to me. It was only towards the end, after we know more about what’s happening on this planet, that I started to feel really invested in the story. I think Tchaikovsky’s ideas are always incredible, and his skills as a writer are generally quite strong, but sometimes his storytelling—the way he structures and reveals the exposition of his worlds and characters in particular—leaves me wanting.

Children of Memory was better for me overall than Children of Ruin. I hesitate with how to rank it against Children of Time because they are both great, just for different reasons. I really love the thought experiment at the heart of this novel, whereas the first book in this series is a tour-de-force exploration of interspecies communication, conflict, and cooperation. In any case, this is yet another excellent science-fiction novel that I’m quite happy to have read.

As the final entry of the Children of Time Trilogy, Children of Memory serves as the culmination of everything Tchaikovsky has worked so hard to build upon. What I loved about this book were the new perspectives added. Miranda added a depth of humanity to the novel, while Liff added childlike innocence and naivete that brought the story to a more personal level. All the different levels of the story also increased my interest. I was constantly surprised by the twists and turns that the story kept taking. At the same time, though, at times I felt incredibly confused by what was going on, by what was real or not real. I know most of it was intentional, but at points parts of the story felt too confusing to a point where I wanted to stop reading.

Overall though, I felt that as a conclusion, Children of Memory was very fitting and served as both extremely thought-provoking (moreso than its predecessors) and relevant to our current society.

Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Space travel is not simple or easy. After terraforming many planets humanity snuffs out its broadening empire through internal conflict. This book explores many many years later as the creatures, and aliens born from the terraforming process try to find out what happened. It shows the nature of human social contracts and how each generation has to live with the repercussions of the prior generation. The personal struggles of the desperate separated colonies cause many to question the reproduction's of their own actions. Very dark story. Showing the ideology of space travel and definition of humanity.

This entry to the Children series had a pretty different premise to the previous 2 entries, but it was a breath of fresh air. There were some pacing issues, but it was made up by the interesting ideas presented and the execution of the latter parts of the story. Recommend for sci-fi fans and a must for fans of the Children of Time/Ruin.

Another fantastic installment of this series! Adrian Tchaikovsky is in a league of his own, doesn’t matter what series we are talking about. 10/10 recommend.

We finally have the final book in the Children of Time trilogy, and it does not disappoint!

The scope of this book is a little different than the first two. Those were all about the exploration and evolution and discovery. But for the most part this book is a much smaller scale. It’s one world…one town…one girl, Liff. And yet it really isn’t that simple, is it? For a lot of Liff’s story you’re going to be confused. There are a lot of time jumps, so pay attention to the chapter headers. Just roll with it, things will be explained. I think it was so beautifully done, and shows both the futility and the hopefulness that I think are inherent in all of Tchaikovsky‘s work.

This is the ninth book that I’ve read from this author, and almost all of them have been five stars. And I’ve come to realize that the way he writes, the choice of words that he uses and how he puts them together, really makes my brain work (in a good way). It’s so difficult to rate books on a 1 to 5 scale, when you have authors who do such stellar work. I may have to come up with some sort of new rating scale just for top tier books 🤷🏼‍♀️

Thank you to NetGalley & Orbit for this advance reader copy. All opinions are my own.

Be advised, this is a 450 page short story.

I’ve read a lot of Tchaikosky in the last year or so, and this is nothing new. He’s astonishingly prolific, but I’ve come to expect a bit of bloat. He makes his points very directly, which is great! I wish more authors would. But given a longer page count, he can repeat the same details to the point of tedium.

Which makes what’s actually happening in this book all the more frustrating.

I read this book pre-release, so I want to be fair and avoid spoilers. But any regular Tchaikovsky reader will be quick to figure out what type of story this is. (He may generally be explicit in his descriptions, but that doesn’t mean he’s an easy read.) After that, it’s just a matter of making it to the end of the freaking thing when he stops deliberately trying to obfuscate the mechanics of the plot.

This is the third book by a major sci-fi author I’ve read in recent memory that tried to pull this trick, and I just don’t understand why people keep doing it. It’s very, very tired. And while Tchaikovsy does tie the conceit directly into one of his characters and the theme of this series, it doesn’t make it any less hackneyed.

There are a lot of interesting themes. There's an exploration of the meanings of identity, consciousness, sentience, and reality itself. Also presented, some interesting moral quandaries embedded in those aforementioned themes. The book gives you a lot to think about. And it's all accomplished while expanding the universe presented in the series' previous books.

At the same time, the two previous books feel somewhat abandoned. Personally, the most enjoyable parts of the series have arisen from its scope. There's been a sense of monumental progress throughout; bounding across generations at the flick of a page. This book felt...stuck. In fact, I felt I was being intentionally frustrated for 78% (exactly) of the book. Repetitive scenes, flat characters, unreliable narrators. Maybe it was meant to evoke a sense of mystery, but I didn't even understand the nature of the problem for the vast majority of the book. After being presented with the answer, the rest of the book just wasn't satisfying. Sorry.

Spaceship Enkidu escaped a falling and poisoned Earth generations ago with its human cargo captained by Heorest Holt. Now their ship is falling apart and Captain Holt is desperate to find a new Eden for the last of Earth's population. A partially terraformed planet they name Imir is his only hope for saving the surviving cargo. Now Liff, Holt's grandaughter, at just 26 (13 by earth years) is hearing whispers from the colonists about the strangers in town not being fun a neighboring fan like they claim. One of them can fix anything even though their technology had been failing for years and all technical knowledge had been lost long ago. And Liff's teacher has radical new ideas about harvesting and the life forms on the planet. But when they shun these advanced beings it could affect the survival of the colony itself.
I like that the uplifted beings from the previous books come back to try and help the human colony. This book was a refreshing change from the first two books, although I've loved them all so far. The details of an unknown evolving species in the first books sometimes had my head spinning, so reading about humans in this book was quite different.
I was thrilled to receive an advance reader copy of this book through Orbit Books and Netgalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Summary:
This is the third book in the ‘Children of Time’ series.

Characters:
This one is funky, because you get some recurring (kind of) characters from the first two books. I don’t wanna go into details and spoil the fun, but let's just say you get to see what happens with the intelligences of all the species you’ve met so far and then some.

Positives:
+ A historical timeline that incorporates the things you learned in the previous books AND a dramatis personae? I feel so spoiled (and quite thankful).
+ Love the new characters that were introduced in this book. A++ for new and interesting culture and thought processes. Gothi and Gethli are the best.

Final Thoughts:
Oh my gosh this book had me questioning my sanity for a little bit. I thought I was losing my mind for a while because of some of the events that happen in the book - so if you get that feeling while you are reading it, you are doing it right. While I really enjoyed the various new characters we are introduced to (and cultures? worlds?); this is my least favorite book in the series. There’s a different timeline and story progression in this book that doesn’t quite line up with the first two. I absolutely loved the paired characters and reading the chapters where they are talking to each other. Miranda was pretty amazing. I feel like there could absolutely be more in this series because of the way this book finished. Highly recommend if you enjoy trippy sci-fi experiences.

This book is the third novel in a science fiction trilogy that begins with the award winning Children of Time, set in a far far future where what is left of humanity has set out in ark ships for planets they hoped were terraformed by generations past. And kudos to the author for providing a very brief recap of those books at the start of this one which help refresh the memory for those of us who read them as they were published - I wish more authors would do that!

The first book involves uplifted intelligent spiders, the second uplifted intelligent octopi, but this book does not continue to follow that pattern, though there are some very interesting birds from a failed colony. Instead, this one takes place on a small ship with an interspecies coalition of characters from the previous books heading towards another possible colony, and on the colony itself where a small band of humans have barely eked out a living, with the part on the planet told from the perspectives of Liff, a young colonist girl, and Miranda, who has come from the spaceship and is undercover on the planet. I can’t really say much more about the plot without giving spoilers, but suffice it to say it quickly becomes clear that something strange is going on on the planet.

Much of the book keeps you in a state of confusion, quite intentionally, as you struggle to figure out what is going on. It’s a compelling read, but for the first 3/4 I was thinking this book wasn’t as good as the first two though at least it was mercifully shorter than the behemoth second book. But the ending - oh my! It managed to simultaneously blow my mind and emotionally move me quite deeply, and I even cried a little. Wow.

I will say this is not one to read as a stand-alone - but if you’re a science fiction fan and haven’t read this series, you absolutely should go back to the first book and read the whole series. And if you have read the first two, just be patient with this one but also read it in when you have time to read the whole thing in a few days so you’re able to follow it without getting hopelessly lost. And hopefully you like me will both love it and hope for another book in the series.

This trilogy makes me feel both stupid and so, so small. But boy does it know what its doing and is it hard to put down. Smart sci fi is the best.

I thoroughly enjoyed returning to this world that Tchaikosvky has created. If you were hesitant to pick this one up after reading the Children of ruin, the second installment, much like I was, I can tell you optimistically to pick this one up!

The third installment of Tchaikovsky’s <i>Children of Time</i> series, <i>Children of Memory</i> is an immersive sci-fi book that explores what it is to be sentient. I feel like this was inspired by Descartes, Seanan McGuire, and maybe even Tchaikovsky’s own <I>Elder Race</I>.

It also made <I>Children of Ruin</I>—which was good but not my favorite—totally worth reading.

The philosophy here is solid, and I can imagine college courses dedicated to this series. Tchaikovsky is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.

<I>Thank you to Netgalley and Orbit Books!</i>

Not at all what I expected, but absolutely fantastic. Was expecting to spend more time with the corvids and their getting to know everyone, but found myself sucked into Miranda and Liff's adventure and trying to figure out what's happened.

I have to confess that I approached this book with some hesitation: while I enjoyed Children of Time (despite the spiders, which is saying a lot!), I was less sanguine about Children of Ruin, mostly because of the pacing, which at times felt a little too slow for my tastes. Children of Memory does suffer slightly from some pacing problems and from a few lengthy philosophical digressions, but the mystery at its core was so intriguing that it kept me motivated to read on until the very end.

Unlike its predecessors, this third installment in the series focuses more closely on humans, and in particular on the humans of an ark ship, the Enkidu, traveling the long distance toward one of the promised terraformed worlds with its huge cargo of frozen colonists. When they reach their destination, a planet they will name Imir, the ship has suffered grievous damage and lost a significant part of its cargo - both people and machinery destined to the creation of the colony - while the crew also discovers that the terraforming project partially failed its goal: Imir is a cold, harsh world with extreme weather patterns, and it will require an enormous effort to establish even the basic living conditions.

After a temporal jump of a few generations, the novel follows the colonization of Imir through the eyes of Liff, a pre-teen girl whose strong spirit is fueled by fairy tales of adventures and great discoveries: thanks to Liff we learn that the colony never truly took off beyond mere survival in what looks like a frontier environment, the constant breakdown of modern tools and machinery forcing the colonists toward a more primitive society than the one they hoped for. What’s worse, there is a strange obsession in the populace toward “Watchers” or “Seccers”, i.e. people outside of their limited community, who might be actively working against its survival: although it seems more myth than reality, this belief fosters an acute climate of suspicion that verges toward paranoia.

A different narrative thread focuses on the small crew of an exploratory vessel from the arachnid/octopus/human civilization we encountered in the two previous books: having reached Imir they debate on the best way to approach the colony, deciding that one of them will try to monitor it in incognito, posing as one of the colonists from the outlying failed farmsteads: Miranda, a combination of human appearance and Nodan consciousness (the parasitic life-form discovered in the previous book) joins the people of Imir working as a teacher, and on her meeting with Liff forms a strong bond with the keenly curious young girl.

Here is where the strangeness begins, because we are presented with often contradictory evidence about life on the planet: several generations have elapsed since the first landing, and yet Liff seems to think about Captain Holt (the expedition leader) as her grandfather; or she is seen living with both her parents while in other narrative segments she’s an orphan living with her inattentive uncle, and so on. This is the mystery that captured my attention and led me to wonder what was truly happening on Imir, not forgetting the further element of a strange signal coming from the planet that leads the onboard A.I. patterned on Earth scientists Avrana Kern (a constant presence throughout the series) to investigate it with the help of the new uplifted species of Corvids we get to know in Children of Memory.

It’s not easy to recap this novel in a handful of spoiler-free sentences, because this book is as complex as it is intriguing: the main attraction for me was the solution to the contradictory experiences of young Liff (and here I have to admit that my own theories did not even come close to the reveal), but there is much more here to keep a reader engrossed. Faithful to the pattern exhibited so far, Adrian Tchaikovsky presents us with a new uplifted kind of creature, the Corvids from Rourke’s world, another planet that proved hostile to humanity but where these birds’ intelligence evolved in a unique pattern of paired individuals forming a collective whole and represented here by Gethli and Gothi, whose discussions about sentience are nothing short of fascinating, besides offering some sparks of humor thanks to their peculiarly worded exchanges that at times reminded me of the chorus elements in Greek tragedies.

Equally intriguing are the observations on the composite society originated by the joining of humans, arachnids, octopusses and Nodan parasites who have learned to coexist peacefully and create a space-faring society whose curiosity about the rest of the universe is the main drive toward exploration. In this respect, the human-looking Miranda is a perfect example of this commonwealth of species: her search for knowledge is somehow marred by the dichotomy between outward appearance and inner substance, which leaves room for some interesting, and at times poignant, considerations about self-image and identity.

The colony on Imir offers other chances of commentary on human nature: the regression to a more primitive way of life, forced by the lack of equipment, seems to have brought on a parallel regression in mindset, since the inhabitants of Landfall (the sole planetary settlement) look more like villagers from a Medieval era rather than the inheritors of a modern society. Their dread and distrust of the “other” (which comes from a very specific reason) brings about a tragic “us vs. them” mentality that is depicted in a few dramatic scenes which effectively display the dangers of mob mentality when paired with fear and ignorance.

Children of Memory is however slightly weighted down by some philosophical digressions on the nature of sentience, which are intriguing on their own but - in my opinion - take more space than necessary in consideration of the need to learn the solution to the mystery that Imir presents to the visitors. Still these digressions were not enough to keep me from forging on and reaching the intriguing reveal: if that was the challenge that the author presented to his readers, I can say that I was able to meet it head on ;-)

Adrian Tchaikovsky's *Children of Memory* (2022; but published in the US on January 31, 2023) is the third science fiction novel in a series that started with *Children of Time* (2015), and continued with *Children of Ruin* (2019). The books are concerned with different varieties of sentience and intelligence. The background scenario for this far-future series is that human beings on Earth set forth with an ambitious project to terraform planets across the galaxy, but that the project and never completed. The terraforming project involves creating a livable climate, and stocking the planet with a diverse enough range of Earth organisms to create a functioning ecology. After this, either the planet can be inhabited by human beings, or else the world is seeded with a plasmid that provokes genetic mutations to raise another species to human-level intelligence. But due to troubles on Earth, the plan is never quite realized. In *Children of Memory*, instead of uplifting nonhuman primates, the plasmid creates a species of intelligent Portia spiders. The novel traces the stages of the spiders' rise to civilization, and considers how their mentality might be different from a human one due to the intrinsic biological differences between the species. In *Children of Ruin*, octopuses on a water world are boosted to human-level intelligence; again, the novel explores how such a cephalopod intelligence would be different from either a primate or an arachnid one. In addition, in the second novel, the human beings, spiders, and octopuses also encounter an alien lifeform that is something like a parasitic slime mold. The slime mold assimilates, stores, and remembers the mentality and the experiences of any other living species that it encounters. This is at first a danger to the other sentient species: the slime mold transforms all the mindful entities that it encounters into more versions of itself. But eventually, this behavior is changed from a predatory, parasitic lifestyle into one of symbiotic mutualism. The slime mold craves novelty and new experiences; eventually it realizes (or is persuaded) that it can get more of these if it does not assimilate other organisms, but rather coexists alongside them and shares their experiences.

[WARNING: WHAT FOLLOWS CONTAINS SPOILERS] *Children of Memory* introduces an additional uplifted species: Corvids (the exact species is not specified; they seem to be a crow and raven hybrid). The Corvids do not get the plasmid that the spiders and octopuses got in the previous volumes; rather, they evolve greater intelligence on a partly-terraformed planet where they have become the dominant species. Once again, Corvid intelligence is qualitatively different than that of human beings and other species in the previous novels. The Corvids are able to speak, but their intellectual activity happens, not in individual birds, but only in pairs. One member of a pair gathers information, parses patterns in the information, and especially notices instances of novelty. The other member of the pair in effect collates this information and strategizes ways to act upon it. Neither of the pair can do much on its own; but in conjunction, the pairs are able to analyze large reams of data and operate complex technology. Whether they are capable of originality (as opposed to noticing and moblizing novelties that they discover in their environment) is uncertain. The Corvids deny that they are sentient; the actual situation seems to be that sentience inheres in their combined operations, but does not quite exist in either of their brains taken separately. In certain ways, the Corvids in the novel remind me of current AI inventions such as ChatGPT; they emit sentences that are insightful, and quote bits and fragments of human discourse and culture in ways that are entirely apt; but (as with our current level of AI) it is not certain that they actually "understand" what they are doing and saying (of course this depends in part on how we define understanding). *Children of Memory* is powerful in the way that it raises questions of this sort -- ones that are very much apropos in the actual world in terms of the powers and effects of the latest AI -- but rejects simplistic pro- and con- answers alike, and instead shows us the difficulty and range of such questions. At one point the Corvids remark that "we know that we don't think," and suggests that other organisms' self-attribution of sentience is nothing more than "a simulation." But of course, how can you know you do not think without thinking this? and what is the distinction between a powerful simulation and that which it is simulating? None of these questions have obvious answers; the novel gives a better account of their complexity than the other, more straightforward arguments about them have done. (Which is, as far as I am concerned, another example of the speculative heft of science fiction; the questions are posed in such a manner that they resist philosophical resolution, but continue to resonate in their difficulty).

The dilemma of the Corvids and their degree (or not) of sentience is encased within a much broader story or unsuccessful terraforming, or of the mismatch between human organisms and their re-created environment. The novel mostly takes place on and around a planet that has been only incompletely terraformed; thousands of years later, a generation starship containing thousands of human beings in cryonic suspension arrives with the mission to found a new society on this planet. The attempt is tragically unsuccessful, for a number of reasons. I don't want to give away all the plot twists here, so I will just say that the novel envisions a series of interactions between Earth-born colonists and their descendants and an unforgiving environment that only includes a limited number of transplanted Earth species, as well as these baseline humans' interactions with the various transformed species (including but not limited to human beings who have themselves been boosted by their encounters with the other intelligent species and with the advanced technologies arising from their encounters), and also with an even more powerful technology left behind by an unknown alien species. There are multiple levels of simulation and speculation, as well as even more complex and self-reflexive levels of both intelligence and sentience (with the relation between these never becoming entirely certain). There is a lot here that deserves unpacking at much greater length than I am capable of, after writing this brief review from just one reading. The entire *Children* series, and this third volume in particular, exemplifies how science fictional fabulation, at its best, can lead us to reflect upon vital issues in ways that simplistic pro- and con- arguments are unable to do.