book: The Children of Memory , Adrian Tchaikovsky
I could summarise the previous two books in The Children of Time series. First one: intersecting narratives detailing the history of the sophont spiders, the Portiids, + the journey taken by humans to the Portiid planet, Kern's World. Second one: another joint narrative, Human-Portiid meeting with the Damascan octopi, and the interwoven histories of the planets Damascus and Nod.
Third book...? Well, people tend to describe it as "it's ravens this time." That is not at all what the book is about, not in the way the first book is about spiders and the second book is about octopi. The third book is an entirely different beast, but it extends naturally from the central ideas of the first two. After all, the first two revolve around non-human sentience ... of course it makes sense to examine how fraught and poorly-delineated the concepts of sentience, of self, of existence, really are. This third installment not only zooms out to the philosophical scale, but the ecological one, depicting the struggle of terraforming without the full suite of tools that Kern and Senkovi had at their disposal.
the book throws you in the deep end. I thought for a second that I had picked up the fourth book in the series, which doesn't exist (yet). Things don't add up. But then the characters in the book also think that things don't add up. They're experiencing the continuity errors too. that intrigue propelled me through.
god damn! I do miss the focus of the previous two books, digging deep into non-human sophonts, but The Children of Memory is good in its own way.
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thanks for reading!🪱🦀
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