book: The Children of Ruin , Adrian Tchaikovsky
not sure how many people were introduced to Tchaikovsky's work along the lines of: the first book is about sophont spiders, and the second one is about sophont octopi. You might wonder if the premise gets stale.
the thing about these books is that there is so much more that explodes out of that single premise. Even while keeping the "collision course" formatting of the previous book (where the story of a spaceship is told alongside the story of the planet the spaceship is going towards), it barely feels the same. This book oscillates into the past and the present, laying out a puzzle, providing small inklings into what might be going on while the two threads (the Human & Portiid ship Lightfoot, and the solar system of Damascus and Nod) collide right at the start and spend a huge amount of the time teetering on the edge of the whole thing going up in smoke.
something I admire about Tchaikovsky's work is the way he really works with how different animals are from one another, rather than doing the usual thing of embedding a human psyche in an animal body. The octopus society is difficult to interface with, both for the Lightfoot and the reader, struggling to come to terms with the way the octopi see the world by virtue of having a radically different neurology.
I was expecting that part, and I loved it. I did not expect the other part: Damascus is octopus-world, Nod is not. Damascus echoes Kern's World from the first book, Nod does not. Nod is an entirely different beast. Nod's influence builds upon the character arc of a Human-Portiid scientist pair, and results in the book spending a huge amount of time in serious meditation on what the self really is.
knowing the way that Human and Portiid self aligns, Nod presents an extreme so perverse the book dips into horror. Delectable.
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