A good read, though I believe I preferred the first two more in comparison, the third installment is one I enjoyed still.

I found myself thinking this was rather interesting at first but then that WA only at the first part of the book. Another good story but rather confusing for me. I don't know if others would be entertained or confused when reading this book. Everything makes sense at the end sort of but also while reading this story I was thinking did this story need to be told in the first place. I can't say I would recommend this book to just anyone but probably for those who like a more cerebral type of plot and story. Children of Time and Children of Ruin were enjoyable reads for me but sadly Children of Memory was not.

This book was okay - an unfortunate step down from Children of Ruin and Children of Time. It just felt like the plot and the characters in this one were less inspired...I still enjoyed it, but I think I would have been okay if I hadn't read it.

6.5/10

I love the themes that are presented in this. It's such a great series all around. The way Tchaikovsky blends the philosophy and science together into the story is so well done.

The characters are all distinct and fleshed out, the world's are so dynamically written, and the overall story of the trilogy is so originally.

Tchaikovsky always make me feel dumb in the best way. I always want to know more, read more, and research more when I read his books.

Tchaikovsky certainly has career momentum. I liked all the books in this series, and most others that read it will too. This is a good addition. It will easily garner high ratings (and has already done so). Recommended.

I really appreciate the free ARC for review!!

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory is the latest and very welcome addition to the Children of Time series.

Picking up after the events of Book #2 Children of Ruin, Children of Memory follows a similar outline to previous books in the series. There are worlds that were in the process of being terraformed that our Kern supported crew will encounter, some of them visited by human ark ships fleeing a dying Earth. Series stalwarts remain, Kern is still the super AI, and spiders named Portia and Fabian.

Where this book differs, is we learn about two separate worlds that had experienced change by humans. As well as integrating the "present" central crew of squid, Human, Portiid and Nodian becoming involved in the plot much sooner, than the usual back and forth through time. The narrative plays out less hard science fiction and more fantastical, truly playing with the structure of time.

It is also a much sadder story, all about making the best that you can with what is available in the name of survival. As stated a few times throughout the book "Sometimes the friends you met along the road were within you all along."

A welcome addition to a strong series that still has many more planets to explore.

Children of Memory takes a different path than the previous two novels to give us a new perspective on the meaning of sentience. This time around we meet an early settler colony on the partially terraformed world of Imir. But as time goes on, not all is as it seems.

Children of Memory is the 3rd book in the Children series an this may possibly be my favorite of the three. Events from Children of Time and Children of Ruin come into play so I do suggest reading those two before this one. (I have heard people suggest they can skip Children of Time for Ruin because of the fear or dislike of spiders).

Children of Memory takes place mostly on the planet Imir and we follow a society that is on the collapse with not enough resources to support the inhabitants. Children of Time did dive into some fantasy tropes that I found to be interesting and reminded me of my favorite parts of the movie "The Village". We follow multiple perspectives with the book with the people on Imir as well as the characters from the previous books who made the voyage over as they continue to explore the universe for life. Self Identity is a topic with this book which I think plays a part with the "Memory" as it deals with experiences a person will go through and how those experiences make a person who they are now.

The story was very satisfying for me and I hope there are more entries in this series. Adrian Tchaikovsky loves his animals and I find it interesting how he can introduce new ones(I loved the pair in this one) and build on what he's already introduced with the two previous entries. I plan on reading more Adrian Tchaikovsky in 2023!

Thank you Orbit Books and NetGalley for providing me with this ARC!

Excellent addition to the series. Tchaikovsky eschews the typical formula (animal species + virus and the results of their evolution). Instead, there's a terraformed planet struggling to survive and a mystery at its core that unravels as the book carries on.

Not my favorite of the three, but still a worthwhile read, and damn, is that a teaser for another sequel?!?!?! Sign me up.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Tchaikovsky could have just done a similar thing as the last two books with a new alien race and a tiny variation but here he gets weird with it and plays with the concepts of Time (and the Children of...?), Memory, and makes this a surprisingly h(H)uman-centric novel. It's clear he really challenged both himself and the reader which makes for an engaging read, but not often easy. There's also a bit more fantasy elements in this sci-fi and it's not as science based as it was in the previous books.

His writing here is some of his best, prose-wise. There's some great passages and allusions to other works as well as themes that work on multiple levels, but it's also challenging being in the middle of the book and sometimes you feel like you missed something or are confused when it's intentional.

I can see this being a divisive entry in the series, but I personally loved it, although I can see some readers being frustrated with it, seems like a good idea to put this as the third entry to a trilogy for the readers that are already invested in this series and willing to "go on an adventure".

I am very happy to say that he's one of my favorite authors who has astounding productivity and throughput. Highly recommend this series and he's an author that I drop everything to read a new one of his books and have my mind expanded.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an absolute master! Only he could create this fantastic universe of adventure, aliens, and inventions.
A must buy!!!

The children of time series is my favorite I've read this year, and this third instalment did not disappoint at all.
This is an amazing sci-fi novel with a story that stands on its own, sprinkled with the characters we've grown to love throughout the previous books - the Humans, the overambitious AI, the Portiid spiders, the Octopi, the sentient slime... - with a few new beings thrown into the mix, for novelty's sake (which I absolutely loved, by the way!)

At its core, this is a story about identity and what it is to be a sentient being - to be an individual yet part of a bigger whole, and to wonder - am I real ? Do I think ? Do I exist ?
10/10 will recommend - this book is definitely ending up underneath the Christmas tree for a couple of my friends (and for me!). To paraphrase a ~lovely~ character from the previous book - "we're going on an adventure!"

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky(Children of Time#3)-Off we go on another adventure with time, species, and interactions that try to describe our destiny. Tchaikovsky can do it all! I loved the first book, Children of Time. The second book was more difficult for me to get through but worth the effort. In this one Tchaikovsky pulls the rug out from under us and sends us on a miraculous journey. Don't miss it! Thanks to NetGalley for the fantastic ARC and thanks to Adrian for doing it again!

Wow!! That is how you close a trilogy! Best science-fiction author of the moment and he will get its place along the great of the great!

This series is how I discovered Adrian Tchaikovsky and hold a special place in my heart because of that. As with the others, this one delivers an experience different from most other sci-fi I read because it’s slower pacing and tone demand attention and focus. There’s times when I may not be able to get into that, but it doesn’t influence my rating because the story always pays off for it in the end. If you’ve loved the rest of the series, I believe you’ll love this one too. If you’ve somehow found this one and not read the others, there is some catch-up to fill in some gaps, but I would recommend reading the other two first. I put it 4.5 because the plot on this one was a bit harder to follow for a while. It’s explained though!

Note: ARC kindly provided by the publisher in exchange for honest review.
4.5 rounded to 5 stars

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an absolute master! Only he could create this fantastic universe of adventure, aliens, and inventions.

To enjoy Children of Memory, it's probably best that you read Children of Ruin and Children of Time. Both are absolutely superb and are necessary to the backstory for the adventure you experience when reading this book. There is plenty of review and synopsis, so this COULD be read as a stand alone but not my recommendation. Why would you keep yourself from enjoying those two unbelievable books anyway?

We continue in the vein of a space opera with many of the same characters. This book takes place well after other planets discussed in previous books have been discovered and settled. Many of our same favorite characters follow the trajectory of an Earth Ark to determine whether any other settlements were successfully created in the galaxy. What they find, is social commentary at it's best. The theorizing on what makes a being sentient alone is worth the price of this book.

I loved this book and hope another is soon to follow. If you love other worlds, galaxies far away, or just hope someday to have intelligent conversation with your pets and pests, Children of Memory is for you! #Orbit #Orbitbooks

Children of Memory is the final leg of the trilogy, but don’t let that dissuade you from grabbing it. This science fiction posits a universe with terraformed worlds out there, a failing earth, and arks of civilization journeying to establish colonies on the terraformed worlds. One such ark reaches its destination but the survivors feel guilt because the colony was never able to support more than a handful and there are thousands still in orbit waiting to be unfrozen. Those that made it seemingly have a tough hardscrabble agrarian life. But there are other evolved species out there filled with curiosity who are watching the colony develop and are hidden in plain sight despite a real existence as octopuses and spiders and the like. There’s also a colonist girl Laff who sees her grandfather’s ghost and chases it into the woods some 200 years after the shuttle landing.

The trick that Tchaikovsky plays is that the real story is not the colonists, but the alien brings watching them. And it is through them that he brings us to philosophical questions about what it means to be sentient and what it means to be real rather than artificial.

There are points where the story is quite confusing as the threads begin to separate, but hang in there. It will all come together in the end and make you think and wonder.

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)

By now, I just accept the fact that Adrian Tchaikovsky can write about anything in SFF and do it brilliantly. Children of Memory, which follows the award-winning Children of Time and Children of Ruin, continues this great saga of human evolution and species uplift in multiple star systems. There is a moving and exciting story at its core, deeply engaging drama testing the limits of reality and identity, and a good encapsulated background of the earlier stories in case you haven’t read the previous books. But there is also a surfeit of intellectual discussion that keeps postponing a final reveal, and, for the first time in my experience of this author’s work, that reveal is a bit disappointing, even though it works in its own way. I can’t really discuss what happens in this novel without some spoiler-ish elements, so proceed at your own risk.

Children of Memory starts by drawing together three strands of the narrative. First, we’re with the core crew of the Enkidu, a huge ship with thousands of sleep-suspended humans aboard. It has escaped from a dying Earth and is heading for a new home where preliminary terraforming is supposed to have prepared a new human world. But there are problems. The Enkidu has breakdowns and multiple repairs, several crew members have been maimed or killed on the approach to Imir, and many of the human cargo have died and been jettisoned. Then the planet Imir isn’t what they were expecting, as drones reveal a poorly developed surface with only microbes and lichen on the land and plankton in the oceans, though the air is breathable. With hard work, Imir may be able to support a small settlement but not the many thousands of humans suspended in sleep.

We first see the result of settlement years later through the eyes of a young girl named Liff. She is twenty-six Imiri years old, and that translates to about twelve in Earth years. She lives with her parents on a farm at the edge of the town called Landfall near the forest of trees the settlers succeeded in planting. It’s a hard life, and some towns-folk have been blaming mysterious “others” for crop failures and breakdowns. The forest has become a forbidding zone where groups of Seccers or Watchers, imagined enemies whom no one has even seen, may be lurking. One evening, Liff sees her grandfather, Heorest Holt, who was the captain of the Enkidu, disappear into the woods. She is convinced he has gone to find a Witch, as she calls a powerful figure who, Liff imagines, lives there in a cave. It becomes her mission to enter that forest, find the Witch and get her grandfather back.

.........
But there are strange things about Liff’s experience. She claims to have seen her grandfather Heorest Holt, even though he died two hundred years earlier. Sometimes we see her in scenes with her parents, sometimes her parents are dead and she’s living with her harsh uncle, sometimes she is in the midst of meetings of the town’s founders, including Holt, as they discuss what to do about community problems. Sometimes, Liff goes in search of the Witch, sometimes that figure comes to seek her out. In each of these shifting scenes, we are drawn more and more deeply into mysteries of memory, time and reality.

............
Just as the other books in this series end on a positive note of the continuing journeys through space to find new life, so does Children of Memory. But this story makes it so clear how difficult the search is and how rare it will be to find that subtle variance of chemistry that enables a new form of existence to detach itself from the void. Tchaikovsky is always trying something new and meaningful, and while this book may not be completely successful, it offers a powerful and thought-provoking experience.