I loved Children of Time and I think this is a really good follow up. I like AT's writing a lot. Even though it's a long book, it's just very easy to fly through. I like the pace and development of the story. The ideas are unique and interesting.

If you're into the genre, I'd definitely recommend it.
Thanks so much to the publisher and Netgalley for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely loved the first book in this series, Children of Time. It was such an all-encompassing sci-fi novel – 10 000 years of history! The evolution of an entire intelligent species! – that I was a little surprised to see a sequel. I couldn’t help wondering how the author was going to top or match that and where he could possibly take the plot next, but I was excited to find out. Ultimately though, while this was an interesting and entertaining enough read, it never really hit quite the thought-provoking or mind-bending heights of its predecessor and in parts seemed to rehash old ground.

To briefly recap on the gloriously complicated plot of Book One, a lightyears-away planet is terraformed. It’s meant to be seeded with monkeys and a virus that can help them to evolve to or beyond human intelligence levels over thousands of years. For complex reasons, the monkeys don’t make it, and the virus affects spiders instead. At the same time, earth undergoes a complete collapse in technology and space travel. Eventually, after thousands of years, science has enough of a renaissance that a ship with passengers in suspended animation is able to leave the ruined earth and set out for the terraformed planet – only to find it populated with space-faring spiders. That plot summary in no way does justice to the complicated ideas at play about what it means to be human and how both species and societies evolve. Particularly noteworthy was the way in which half the chapters were from the point of view of spiders at various parts of their mental and cultural development, told in a way that made them sympathetic and just about relatable, but also very, very “other”.

If I were to summarise Book Two in one sentence, it does basically the same thing, but with a different terraformed planet, octopuses instead of spiders, and a joint human-spider space exploration mission instead of the generation ship.

To expand on that, it opens around the same period Book One did – ie. Very far into the future from our perspective, but thousands and thousands of years before most of the rest of the plot. Once again, we have a team of slightly oddball scientists out terraforming, when most systems fail and all transmissions from earth cease. I found this bit very chilling and intriguing. The first book more or less stopped there and immediately jumped ahead in time, whereas this really explores the crews sense of isolation and the fear they may be the only humans left in the universe. Without going too far into spoilers, there’s quite a lot going on in this section, including the discovery of (unintelligent) alien life, an almost zombie-esque subplot, and of course, the breeding of hyper-intelligent octopuses (or octopi – how to pluralise the word is a bit of a running joke!).

The other main strand picks up more or less where Book One finished, with humans now living on the spider planet and the two species in a slightly uncomfortable alliance. A mixed group set out to look for other inhabitable planets and signs of life, and there’s some quite interesting stuff about their growing bonds but also their cultural and linguistic barriers and how individuals on both sides are working to overcome this. My main issue with this section was that the spiders didn’t seem quite as intriguingly “other” as they had in the previous instalment, and perhaps more importantly, that I found it hard to care that deeply about any of the characters, spider or human, as individuals. Also, their goals weren’t quite clear – they were just exploring for fun, rather than in a desperate attempt at survival.

Eventually, the two strands connect. The old terraforming humans are long gone, but we do get fully evolved octopuses. They were enjoyably weird, but didn’t resonate with me or give me as much of a sense of a fully fleshed out world, culture and mindset as the spiders. For better or worse, there wasn’t actually all that much from their point of view. One of the human-spider pairings on the exploration ship work in linguistics, and their attempts to communicate with the octopuses, who don’t really have language in the normal sense of the term, strongly reminded me of the film Arrival.

Throughout, the book was very heavy on the science, and interestingly, there was as much, if not more, time devoted to biology and perhaps even a sort of social science, as to the physics and technology you might expect from heavy sci-fi (though there was a fair bit of the latter too and a sprinkling of space battles and similar). Despite some forays in that direction, I sadly didn’t get much of a sense of the philosophical edge that made the previous book so special.

Overall, this was fine and you have to admire the author’s ambition and imagination. It’s definitely worth a read if you enjoyed Children of Time, but don’t expect something quite as standout.

Uno de los lanzamientos más esperados de este año era sin duda alguna la continuación de la maravillosa Children of Time, como ya se comentó en el último episodio del año pasado de los VerdHugos.

Adrian Tchaikovsky ha decidido ofrecernos una obra muy ambiciosa, que eleva a la enésima potencia la estructura que utilizaba en la primera entrega. Si lo que buscas es especulación sobre el desarrollo de razas alienígenas y su interrelación con los humanos este es sin duda tu libro, aunque no puedo decir que sea una obra perfecta.
El autor vuelve a dividir la narración entre el presente y el pasado, pero en esta ocasión con un gambito muy arriesgado, ya que las acciones del pasado influyen mucho en el futuro, condicionando gran parte de la narración a las acciones de la otra línea temporal. El autor sale bastante airoso de esta apuesta con una mezcla de ocultación de información y audacia, así como con oficio narrativo.
Pero hay otro problema añadido y es la dificultad intrínseca derivada de un primer contacto con una civilización alienígena. Y aquí Tchaikovsky no termina de conseguirlo. Porque no estamos hablando solo de uno, o de dos contactos y la complejidad de las interacciones a veces se le va de las manos. La falta de unas referencias en las que basarse para entender estas interacciones dificulta mucho el proceso lector. A pesar de que hay bases comunes que tienden puentes entre culturas, las diferencias intrínsecas de cada especie exigen mucho para el disfrute del libro. Estas diferencias también hacen que la empatía en ocasiones brille por su ausencia, no solo en el libro si no también por parte del lector.
Me ha gustado mucho la especulación científica que muestra Children of Ruin. De especial importancia son la biología y la lingüística, pero no se limita a desarrollar estos dos campos. No quiero ni imaginar la ingente cantidad de documentación que ha tenido que manejar el autor para ofrecernos esta novela tan compleja.
Algo que no me ha terminado de convencer tampoco es el final de la historia, no sé si llamarlo ingenuo o excesivamente optimista. Pero me ha encantado cómo se habla sobre los problemas inherentes al desarrollo de la civilización y la tecnología (sobrepoblación, contaminación…) desde otra perspectiva. Es un gran valor añadido a la novela.
A pesar de no ser plato de mi gusto, también hay algunas escenas de terror horriblemente inquietantes de esas que vas leyendo con el corazón en un puño, algo que añade tensión a un libro que en ocasiones no tiene un ritmo excesivamente acelerado.
No puedo dejar de recomendar este libro, aunque eso sí, primero hay que leer Children of Time porque Children of Ruin no se puede considerar una lectura independiente.

I LOVED Children of Time and thought it was truly an excellent novel. Children of Ruin is a fantastic follow up, the author has some really interesting and novel ideas that are well developed throughout the story.

There's no doubt that this is a long book but i flew through parts of it and loved the writing style. I think the plot is great and whilst at times, it does feel a little bit like too much is going on, it all works itself out nicely.

Overall i loved this and will be recommending it to all of my friends!

As good as Children of Time was (and it is very good indeed), in some ways it's a book which I liked despite myself, given the leads were mostly either human dickheads, or spiders. Whereas this sequel ticks enough of my boxes that I wasn't surprised to find myself liking it even more. True, it may not quite have the first book's Stapledonian sweep of time (despite starting earlier and finishing later), but in exchange it probes deeper into areas which were perhaps moved over a little too swiftly and easily first time around. At the very least, it's a perfect complement.

In what follows, I'll avoid giving away any late developments, but if you want to come to Children of Ruin entirely cold, avert your eyes until you're done, because I'll need to talk about the basic premise.

So: Children of Time started with a mission seeding a terraformed world with higher life, but sent off on a tangent by a terrorist act. This begins around the same time, following a crew embarked on the initial terraforming project elsewhere. First difference: it's a leisurely start, as against CoT's near-instant descent into chaos. Second: everyone on this mission is quite likable. I mean, yes, I had a certain sympathy for Kern's megalomania and condescension, because as events in her story would prove, humanity is mostly terrible. But replay that and you could easily have ended up with a series which was largely about the failures of the space programme's HR department. Whereas here, our main human viewpoint character is Disra Senkovi, a scientist with a great sense of humour, even if nobody else ever gets his jokes, and who is very social, just mainly with octopi* rather than people. The word is never used, but he seems to be coded as pretty autistic. Relatable, is what I'm saying. Even his boss, though, is basically fine too – Yusuf Baltiel has different priorities, a bit of a messianic side, but he's able to relate to his crew, he never steamrollers or gets too Billy Big Bollocks. He's not perfect, but he's basically a good leader. Hell, the rest of the crew aren't bad either. And as for octopi, they're pretty much the most likable non-fluffy animals, aren't they? Everything looks like it might, despite the title, be sort of OK. Whereas the first book's inciting catastrophe is pure stupidity and awfulness, when things do start going wrong here, it's just a matter of misplaced optimism and excessive curiosity (albeit, on the octopi's part, mainly curiosity as to what spaceships are made of and whether any of it is edible).

Except, as much as the mood lulls us into forgetting it, we already know from the first book what's coming, locked in as inevitably by Tchaikovsky's worldbuilding as it is on Earth's radio horizon. That anyone survives at all relies on a bit of a remarkable double coincidence, but fuck it; resolving a story by coincidence is questionable, but kicking one off that way is pretty much how stories happen, isn't it?

Where the first book advanced consistently if unevenly through time, switching back and forth from human to spider viewpoints, this one alternates sections in Senkovi's 'past' (which is to say, still our future) with the much further future 'present' following on from the end of Children of Time. A joint human/spider mission has gone looking for other life, and found the legacy of Senkovi and Baltiel's mission. But within each of those two time zones, we have various point-of-view characters, from various species. Children of Time made do with two-and-a-bit viewpoint consciousness types, whereas here we have at least five: the humans; the spiders; the octopi (in some ways the strangest of the lot, in all their emotive, amorphous, multi-part interaction with the manipulable world around them); Kern, now a fractured AI run on ants and trying to remember what it was like to be human; and the other life Senkovi's ship found, the setting's first encounter with genuinely non-Terran evolution.

And if any of those various types were to attempt to get inside each other's sensoria, find common ground as per the resolution of the first book – well, that would make things even more of a tangle, wouldn't it?

There are times, around the middle of the book, where it feels as if Tchaikovsky may have a few too many plates spinning at once, and where some of the protagonists start to feel as if they're being crowded out. But even then you get stuff like one horribly tense passage on a space station where I was frantically tapping my feet, spider-style, just to burn off some of the anxiety over the ghastly things which looked set to happen. There's one simple phrase which I'm not sure I'll ever hear innocently again. There is, all in all, a book which I suspected might be an unnecessary sequel, yet maybe proves itself more ambitious still than its predecessor, and mostly gets away with it. And at its heart, a message about the importance, but also the possibility, of communicating over gaps in understanding which at first seem unbridgable. Fingers crossed, eh?

*Yes, there is some back and forth over the plural; at one point all three of the main contenders are used within a couple of pages. This is the one with which I grew up, so it's the one I'm using here.

(Netgalley ARC. Which, being a lucky swine, I got hold of before I'd even finished Children of Time, and whose occasional typos and glitches, like 'simulacra' for 'simulacrum' and a backwards analogy, will hopefully be fixed in the final copies)

I’ve read a lot of Tchaikovsky’s fantasy fiction but this was the first sci-fi of his I picked up. As it turns out, I should have checked if it was the first book in the series (I’m dreadful for doing this). It’s actually a sequel to Children of Time – which I will now have to find and read. Despite that, and the fact that I’m sure I missed out on things because I hadn’t read the first book, this was still very accessible. I love the author’s writing style and the world building was fabulous. Also, giant sentient spiders? I HAVE to read the first book now! I enjoyed the way the plot doubled back on itself. I really like non linear stories with rich sub plots so this was right up my street. In addition we are treated to a gentle commentary on a number of issues such as religion, the value of life, over population and colonisation. This was an absolute treat.