Book(s) of the Month - concluding two trilogies

Two books to review this month, both by science-fiction author Adrian Tchaikovsky. Both books are the concluding novels in trilogies. <<<SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW>>>

The first book up for review is Children of Memory. This is the third 'Children of...' book and although based in the same universe and following on from other events therein, doesn't really feature the same characters as the preceding two books. It has versions of some characters, in that characters in this book  have inherited characteristics or are copies of original characters. 

This series began with Children of Time, set in the deep future. A human plan to 'terraform' a planet and seed it with intelligent life goes awry, just as human civilisation collapses. Centuries later, humans have got some way back towards their former pinnacle and set out to discover what happened to the planned colonies in a second terraforming expansion. They discover the terraformed planet and its new occupants - a race of giant, intelligent spiders. 

Children of Time  was followed by Children of Ruin, which set the same stage except this time on an ocean world with octopuses instead of spiders. There is also an alien life-form that starts out as an accidental antagonist that innocently kills everything it infects. The book concludes with humans and spiders, who are now allies, saving the octopuses and reaching common cause with the aliens.

In Children of Memory we meet a combined crew of human, spider, octopus and alien as they discover a human colony from the second age of human terraforming. They have also recruited members of a new race evolved from corvids on yet another abandoned first age terraforming project. 

The super-evolved birds turn out to be the most interesting characters in the book. There are two of them, Gethli and Gothel, who are incapable of acting individually, but combined are incredibly good at taking things apart and putting them back together again. That includes mechanical items and also computer code, psychoanalysis, and so on. They also open the door to a lot of conversations about what qualifies as sentience and whether intelligence and 'thought' is just a construct used to understand consciousness. That sounds dry, but I like conceptual discussions like that, and there was plenty of humour in the dialogue to keep it accessible. 

The overall story is mildly convoluted. The author is going for a twist, setting up the scene to be deliberately contradictory. The timeline is all off and it becomes apparent that the characters are experiencing events at different times in the colony's history, but don't know that. 

I can't really review this book properly without a big reveal. So skip the next paragraph if you don't want spoilers and scroll past it.

<<<SPOILER WARNING>>>

So it turns out the mixed up timeline is because there is an alien device of unknown origin that has recorded the lifecycle of the doomed colony and the exploration party are trapped in it. Except there is then another twist - the simulation is an entire fiction. The initial landing party were destroyed as they tried to land, but not before the alien device replicated the crew in exacting detail. The device then simulated what would have happened if they had landed. 

So, the first twist is basically "they woke up and it was all a dream recording" and the characters were interacting with it (and messing it up). And then the second twist was it wasn't a recording, it was just conjecture by a bored machine who wondered what would have happened. So the recording turned out to be a dream after all. I thought the second twist was unnecessary and the author was being too cute. There is no reason given why an alien machine would fabricate what a colony would look like. The recording being disrupted by the new incursion of beings made more sense to me. 

<<<END OF SPOILERS>>>

So, overall, I didn't think Children of Time was as good at the preceding two books in the series but it was still worth reading. I really liked the corvid characters and felt they added something to the story without being just another elevated version of a creature. Tchaikovsky is good at surveying the deep future and writing as if aeons have passed, and it's a credible vision. 

The second book I'm reviewing is Lords of Uncreation. This is the third series in a trilogy that I began reading last year after buying the first book in Browsers Bookshop in Porthmadog. On our recent trip to North Wales, we went back to Porthmadog and I bought the concluding volume. (The second book in the series was a Christmas present.) Books one and two have been books of the month previously. (Shards of Earth review; Eyes of the Void review.)

So, on to book 3... The big space-war against the terrifyingly destructive 'architects' is still going on. Idris, who is one of the few humans who can navigate 'unspace', has discovered that the architects are enslaved by other, even more mysterious entities. This book is basically about how Idris confronts those entities - the beings who are the self-appointed 'Lords of Uncreation'. 

There are a couple of tangents in the book. The one featuring the mysterious race, the Essiel, was quite entertaining. I like how the race remains inscrutable and unfathomable, even as characters interact with it more. It feels properly alien. The other tangent - about the genetically engineered all-female human offshoot called the Parthenon - is less compelling. 

I felt the conclusion of the book was very satisfying, but if I had one criticism, it's that it took a bit long to get there. Some of the tangents slowed the main story down - particularly in my view the chapters about the political infighting in the Psrthenon - and there seemed to be a lot of back and forth over the exact nature of the threat to the universe. Eventually, though, everyone worked out what needed to be done and did it. 

They are chunky books (500-600 pages each), yet enjoyable and I'd recommend them to anyone with a taste for science-fiction.