Children of Memory (AudiobookFormat, 2023, Hachette B and Blackstone Publishing)
audio cd, 1 pages
Published Jan. 31, 2023 by Hachette B and Blackstone Publishing.
A wild look into the nature of consciousness and sapience. It's a slow-moving book, and the middle gets confusing. But don't worry, you didn't miss anything. It'll sort itself out.
Really enjoyed this. Wish Bookwyrm allowed for half stars - would be 4.5 here. So many interesting ideas, explored well. Always kept me guessing what was happening, and the story unwound at a (mostly) pleasing pace. A slow pace, mind - not one for action-science fiction fans; this is very thinky, philosophical stuff.
A couple of the chapters didn't quite work for me - more narrative background than story, they contributed to the overall understanding but I found them harder to get through than the rest - but Tchaikovsky really does explore some fascinating concepts here and I recommend this one for anyone into this slower style of science fiction.
Children of Memory is the third (and final?) book in the Children of Time saga. I have very mixed feelings about this book (and also this series). If I had to sum up my feelings, the last 50 pages of this book are absolutely excellent but the middle ~200 pages drag on for quite some time. If I had to review the series as a whole, I am glad I read these three books personally, but my recommendation for others who hadn't read any would be to read the first book and stop there.
One thing I think this series does well is that each book has a very different vibe overall. Book one is very space opera / evolutionary theater, book two adds in a significant horror element, and book three feels more like a mystery (fairytale)? of strange contradictory events. I strongly agree with Tak, who described this …
Children of Memory is the third (and final?) book in the Children of Time saga. I have very mixed feelings about this book (and also this series). If I had to sum up my feelings, the last 50 pages of this book are absolutely excellent but the middle ~200 pages drag on for quite some time. If I had to review the series as a whole, I am glad I read these three books personally, but my recommendation for others who hadn't read any would be to read the first book and stop there.
One thing I think this series does well is that each book has a very different vibe overall. Book one is very space opera / evolutionary theater, book two adds in a significant horror element, and book three feels more like a mystery (fairytale)? of strange contradictory events. I strongly agree with Tak, who described this third book as Locked Tomb-esque.
The technological development arc in this series reminders me a little of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past series. By book three of each of these series, the technology level has just gone so far into post-human / galaxy teleporting / immortality / body uploads / consciousness-splitting developments that it almost feels disconnecting to me as a reader. What are the desires and needs of people who live like this even like? I think this book gets into some of what that might be, but in both of these series I found it harder to connect with characters as time went on.
Similar to the previous two books in this series, which each have their own featured uplifted animal, this book also brings in some extremely smart corvids. Other characters are not sure what to make of them and spend a lot of time trying to figure out if they are sentient or not. (The birds say they are absolutely not.) I found the birds Gothi and Gethli to be very endearing characters. I love love loved the small interstitial chapters where they are wittily talking to each other and making jokes. I felt like it nailed "birds are really interested in shiny new things and uninterested in everything else" angle as well as the "corvids are both extremely chatty and smart" one.
This book also adds a lot of good development for characters from book one and book two. I like that we get to see extra sides of Kern(s), as well as a significant perspective from a character who is Those-of-We trying to be a Human named Miranda that they knew specifically. They're coping with the tension of wanting to know everything, with being a terrible entity in the past that they're ashamed of, with various emotional traumas, and with the stress of pretending to be one thing when really they are many many things at once. I felt like the book two perspective on Those-of-We was necessarily limited and I was glad that book three has a chance to let them shine.
I feel like any discussion of the end of the book is going to be extremely full of major spoilers, so I will leave that in a follow-up comment. Suffice it to say that I felt like the ending to this book was as solid (if not more solid) than book one and really tied together everything that the book put out there in a satisfying way.
Still very much worth it.
Loved it just as much as the previous two books that it builds on.
Notes:
New planets, new forms of alien intelligence.
The corvids were my favorite alien species in a while.
Are they a form of AI? Can AI be sentient? Are any of us? Questions that loom especially large this year.
Second book looking at the simulation hypothesis that I've read this year.
Liff's story is heartbreaking.
Decanting the swarm intelligence from book 2 into a single person named Miranda is a brilliant solution to the problem of how to address the "we".
The eventual reveal again comes with a twist and a second, even better reveal. How does Tchaikovsky do this?
Similar to a lot of the other reviews I'm reading this one just didn't grip me quite as much as the first two books. I liked the folk tale atmosphere and the fact that it uses the first two books being similar to trick you into thinking that this one would follow a similar path, but I didn't feel that the alien life forms were as well explored in this book. We got very little on the actual paired-mind of the corvids, with most of the focus being on the two individual parts of the mind, and the other mind that possibly exists in the book is only hinted at vaguely. I enjoyed the ending, but not as much as the first two since the big reveal at the end felt a bit obvious (albeit the details were all different from my own guesses).
Overall this felt like the middle …
Similar to a lot of the other reviews I'm reading this one just didn't grip me quite as much as the first two books. I liked the folk tale atmosphere and the fact that it uses the first two books being similar to trick you into thinking that this one would follow a similar path, but I didn't feel that the alien life forms were as well explored in this book. We got very little on the actual paired-mind of the corvids, with most of the focus being on the two individual parts of the mind, and the other mind that possibly exists in the book is only hinted at vaguely. I enjoyed the ending, but not as much as the first two since the big reveal at the end felt a bit obvious (albeit the details were all different from my own guesses).
Overall this felt like the middle could have been condensed and that this book was mostly just setting up a plot for a future book without having much of a satisfying story of its own. That being said, I still enjoyed it enough to give it 4 stars and would recommend it if you liked the first two books.
This one seemed to drag on forever and ever, for various reasons including the narrative architecture chosen for the book. All in all, I found it more frustrating than enjoyable unfortunately. Might be worth your time if you want to be completist about reading the whole series, but I'd definitely grab a copy from the library before you commit to buying it.
Content warning plot arc metaspoilers maybe? also for Nona the Ninth
This one took me on a very Nona the Ninth-like journey, from "I am following the plot and know what is going on" to "I am no longer following the plot, what the hell is going on" to "Wow, I did not see that coming"
Children of Memory takes the series to new heights, with a mix of returning characters and newcomers for this installment. The first 100 or so pages had me wondering if Tchaikovsky had strayed too far from the first two books, but things quickly clicked into place. While still science fiction at its core, fantasy and fairytale elements are woven in, making for a thrilling combination that was eventually hard to put down.
There isn’t much I can say about this one without getting into spoilers. All three of these books are great, but this was a masterpiece.
There's no real way to state why I didn't like this book as much as its predecessors without spoiling nearly the entire thing. Suffice to say, the tone of this book is inconsistent with the rest of the series.
I am afraid I am going to have to be a little hard here and say this barely scraped 4 stars for me. The middle really dragged. I can't really explain why without going into spoilers (which I am not a fan of doing in reviews). I will say that there wasn't the same sense of progress that you got from the first two books. A sense of something new developing. The middle third is very focused on a (to all appearances) regressive setting, thus the sense of the new wasn't there for me for a good chunk of this read.
The ideas are still top tier. The book started well and the ending was satisfying. Maybe it needed a tighter edit, maybe I was just not in the right place for this.
Still, it is Tchaikovsky and my reservations could just be a me thing. It's still at least …
I am afraid I am going to have to be a little hard here and say this barely scraped 4 stars for me. The middle really dragged. I can't really explain why without going into spoilers (which I am not a fan of doing in reviews). I will say that there wasn't the same sense of progress that you got from the first two books. A sense of something new developing. The middle third is very focused on a (to all appearances) regressive setting, thus the sense of the new wasn't there for me for a good chunk of this read.
The ideas are still top tier. The book started well and the ending was satisfying. Maybe it needed a tighter edit, maybe I was just not in the right place for this.
Still, it is Tchaikovsky and my reservations could just be a me thing. It's still at least a 4 star for me so I can definitely recommend it. Especially if you enjoyed the first two in the series.
I had seen a review saying this book differed from the first two, and from that perspective, the book seemed to be incredibly in line with the first two. I guess, it's also the overall feeling about it. Pretty cool that once again a similar-ish idea is made to feel fresh and interesting. Once again, cool to flirt with the idea of an intelligence sufficiently different from ours to be challenging to recognize yet familiar enough to be recognizable. Though the first book in the series is still the one with the most impact, the whole trilogy is wonderful and pretty much best books I've read.
The whole series is wonderful. Again a new super smart species of animal. Quite different from the other 2 books, and more philosophy than expected (in a good way). Nice!
LOVED IT. Now, waiting for the next one. Love the characters and the voice of the narration.
This one had a 'Star Trek' vibe to it. Need the next instalment.
Wow. Outstanding! This book is vastly different than the other two. I was frustrated with most of it and was sure I would be rating it 2 stars, maybe 3, even though the writing style was amazing, but the last hundred pages blew my mind.
Take all these 5 stars, Adrian, and go buy something nice with 'em.
