2019-11-19 - Review: Children of Ruin ------------------------------------- Title: Children of Ruin Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky Genre: SF / Space Opera This book is the sequel to 2016's "Children of Time" a book I enthusiastically squee'd about when I read and reviewed it on my old website. https://ascraeus.org/children-of-time-review/ As I said then "This is really good british science fiction, thought-provoking and entertaining in equal measure." The sequel just doesn't disappoint, hitting all the things which I so loved in "Time". I had very real concerns that the sequel would lack the impact of the first book, the ending of the first was a complete reversal, something I can't imagine anyone saw coming, and a sequel would have to deal with those events in a meaningful way. Tchaikovsky handles this transition brilliantly, neither getting too bogged down in the existential crises nor ignoring them completely as some lesser writers might. Instead those issues permeate this book, as the Portiid and Human explorers are faced with new unknown challenges. Like the last book, this one uses multiple points of view. Where the narrative of "Time" was split between Kern's World - a terraforming experiment gone wildly, incredibly amok - and the _Gilgamesh_ - an ark ship wending between the stars on a centuries-long voyage - "Ruin" compacts the story into a single star system, and is all the better for it. That's not to say that "Ruin" is any less complex. That single system is presented at differing timeframes, from the commencement of a terraforming experiment to the final, vicious climax of a conflict between the lifeforms discovered and created by that experiment. Where we previously were confronted by the alien intelligence of uplifted spiders, here we have uplifted cephalapods, a species which has a distributed nervous system, where consciousnes only partly resides in the brain. The thing, the most incredible thing of all, is that this is only the beginning of the complexity, the alienness, the voyage into the unknown. Nothing I've said above spoils anything past the first few chapters. If I was to summarise this entire thing, then it would be thusly: IN the far future, superintelligent octopuses, superintelligent spiders (who use ant colonies as a computer system) and their Human allies all come together in an incredible adventure in a richly tapestried, incredibly realised world. I really can't recommend this book strongly enough, it is *glorious*. I briefly met Adrian at the WorldCon in Dublin, and now I wish I had read this beforehand. I am in awe of this man, and his abilities. Base Score: 8/10 Some body horror stuff in there left me a little queasy, and amped up the anxiety levels. Adjustment: +2 for just sheer unalloyed joy Rating: 5/5 - Strong Recommendation