I'll admit it, "Children of Memory" had me confused for a large part of the book and then things started to click in my brain and... Whoa! What a brilliant concept! I love Adrian Tchaikovsky's writing, and I always know I'm in for an interesting read when I pick up one of his books. So far, the "Children of Time" series has failed to disappoint... Can we have at least 3 more books, please?

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

Liff’s grandfather was the captain of the ark spaceship Enkidu, one of the large ships that carried thousands of people from Earth when the planet died. The ship travelled for centuries before reaching Imir, a world barely capable of supporting life, but the ship was failing, and the crew had no choice but to land. By the time Liff is born, the community on Imir has scratched out a meagre existence on the planet. Life is tough and getting harder. Things are made worse by the residents losing their memories of past events, creating the rumour other people on the planet want to harm the settlers. Suspicion falls on Maria, Liff’s teacher, who has come from a farm far from the main town. Maria and Liff must uncover the truth of the missing memories before it is too late for the colony.
Book 3 of The Children of Time series starts with the crew of an ark ship waking up to their worst-case scenario. The planet they had travelled for years to reach wasn’t the Eden they were hoping for, and their ship could not go any further. The crew are beset with impossible decisions from where to land to who; of their fifty thousand sleeping souls on board, they wake up. Imir shows signs of some of the original terraformers who had left Earth to pave the way for future generations, but not enough change has happened. It is a grim start that sets the tone for the rest of the book.
By the time we met Liff, generations had passed, and the colony had reverted to a farming community with limited technology and plenty of Middle-Age superstitions. The world-building is perfect; it’s easy to believe the community had regressed because their equipment was so faulty when they arrived. Liff believes that a witch lives in the forest near her house and in the Seccers, a secretive second colony whom no one has ever seen, but is blamed for all the wrongs befalling her home town because it is easier to blame a faceless other than admit your neighbours are robbing you.
My only complaint with the story is in the middle, where Maria’s background is revealed. She is an outsider, a visitor from another planet, but she isn’t responsible for what’s happening on Imir. We don’t follow Maria’s path chronologically. There are vague timescales at the start of each section, like Not Long Ago or Long Ago, but these didn’t help me easily slot each event in a timescale. I had to reread parts to put the jigsaw together. Time is a very fluid concept in this book. However, I persevered, and everything made perfect sense by the end. Children of Memory is a book that definitely warrants a second read.
Children of Memory is the third book in a series, and while it’s always good to read what’s gone before to understand the subtleties you might otherwise have missed, it’s not essential in this case. The start of the book has an excellent and detailed prologue that explains how certain species, spiders, octopuses, humans and a particular microbe, have all achieved a heightened self-awareness and outstripped their predecessors. This is repeated within the book with a new species of ravens called Corvids, and there is much speculation about whether the Corvids are self-aware, which is a major theme for the book – what classes as self-awareness, and what can achieve it.
Children of Time is another masterpiece from Adrian Tchaikovksy, blending and bending genres to create something impossible to define. There are enough riddles and surprises to keep you guessing until the end, and I loved the blend of the indomitable human spirit overcoming all odds juxtaposing our reliance on technology that will ultimately be our downfall. Highly recommended.

There's a reason why Tchaikovsky is one of my favourite authors - he always delivers. Children of Memory is quite unlike the first two books in the series, and in fact, reminded me a lot of Elder Race (which is quite possibly my favourite novella ever). Here, Tchaikovsky doesn't engage in the virus + species = advanced society formula, but instead jumps between three narratives, weaving them together like a tapestry. This is also a much more complex, philosophically-speaking, story than the previous books in the series, and Tchaikovsky does this brilliantly. I can't wait to recommend more readers to this series & author in the Bookshop.

Children of Memory is the third in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, and much like its predecessors is, to be frank, an absolute banger of a story. It's also, that aside, a book that's difficult to describe succinctly. It's a book that grapples with big ideas about mortality and personhood, but also explores the more personal, intimate stories of people struggling to make lives in a hostile environment - and, to be fair, some of those people aren't necessarily human. That dovetailing of big ideas with emotional, honest, intimate moments is something Tchaikovsky has mastered, and it works well again here. If you're here for the raw, messy, wonderfully crafted characters, you're good. If you're here for a plot that will grab hold as tension ramps up and into catharsis and up again,..you're good. If you're here for an imaginatively crafted future and an exploration of larger concepts in a narrative framework, then again, this one's for you. Which is a long winded way of giving the short version, this is a damn good book, and you should read it.

Speaking of the world. Well, we're in an interesting space here. Humanity is out of the bottle, in ships that can leap between solar systems, looking for any of its own. They're looking on planets that were scheduled for colonisation before the collapse of civilisation on Earth put a damper on things. Post-recovery, we're once again out here causing trouble. Though now we're doing it with friends, including sentient spiders, octopi, and bacteria which can absorb personalities and craft bodies and take them for a ride. It's an absolutely wild space, and one that's about to get even stranger. There's two major pieces of setting at play. One is a colony, populated by humans, whose past history we're slowly exposed to over the course of the book. A hardscrabble world on the bare edge of possible survivability, and a crew struggling to make things sustainable while thawing out the frozen sleeper cargo they brought with them gives things a terrifying frontier feel. The blend of the high tech and the low, the struggle at the edge of survivability, gives the setting an immediacy and a power it's hard to overemphasise. You can feel for these people, scrounging out a life from soil they have to make live for them, while overhead a sleeper ship circles in high orbit. And then, well, then there's the birds. Survivors of a research and terraforming team gone horribly wrong after collapse, evolving under pressure into duos that between them manage a convincing appearance of sentience, but individually definitely aren't. As characters they're fantastic, and I'll chat a bit more about that in a second, but wanted to say that the history of these duos, the desperation of a team trying to build something from the wrong side of societal collapse, that history is fantastic, Vividly imagined, authentically described, laced with the emotion and passion and horror that makes for authentic life.

The characters match that feeling actually. There's the captain of the slow seed ship, desperately trying to pull tech and crew from the shattered remnants of his craft, and build a civilisation back up from nothing. Surrounded by his command crew and survivors, you can feel the pressure on them all, you can feel the passion and energy that animates a people who know that their survival is not guaranteed. Who know that the survival of everyone after them is not guaranteed. Who know they have to build something. They're people, top to toe. But the same is true of the ravens, talking to each other and construction their discussions with other people in terms of cultural references and constructed meaning. They're people, even if they're different. And the people of our future, the octopi and the living gestalts and the spiders and the humans learning to be better. They're all people, even in they're not all humans. And the differences of their lived experience are often, though not always subtle. And it's amazing how they all feel like people, but they also feel strange. But they feel genuine, and that's what matters - the experiences are comprehensible but different, and that's sometimes hard to get used to, but it's also an absolute delight. These are living breathing real people, they're just different to us, and how we expect to be. But they're amazingly well realised, and great fun to read.

Which is true of the story too. I won't spoil it , because there's some twists in there that took me a little while to absorb. But I will say that it works across multiple layers. This is a story which explores what it means ot be sentient. Explores the collapse and rebuilding of societies. Explores how people cope and manage in crisis. Explores identity and reality. But also explores family relationships and friendships and meaning. It doesn't shy away from either of these, and builds a story that is emotionally wracking but also an extremely compelling page-turner of action and adventure and mystery as a result.

Which brings me back to the beginning: this book is an absolute banger, Tchaikovsky has hit it out of the park again, and you should, if you're a sci-fi fan, read it

Children of Memory departs from the formula that the first two books in the trilogy follow, in that it is a more focused narrative, both in place and in time. Once again, we are dealing with a ‘native’ population and a band of explorers encountering that population. However, this time, the natives are not spiders or octopi, but a human settlement. A multi-species team of explorers infiltrates this settlement, to find out what is going on on the planet. The cast is supplemented by uplifted corvids, which are once again fascinating.

However, whereas in the first two books, the puzzle was in understanding a mysterious world or ecosystem through the eyes of the explorers, the puzzle in third book is figuring out what or who the explorers themselves are, and how their actions connect the many time-jumps the story takes. Unfortunately, this was a lot less interesting to me. In the first two books, I felt like I gradually learned more about mysterious worlds, with pieces evolving gradually and fitting together elegantly. In this book, it felt more like I was in the dark for ¾ of it, and then a supposed ‘aha’-moment which didn’t really click for me. A further issue is that the multi-species team of explorers isn’t actually that – they are all part of a collective intelligences ‘decanted’ into effectively replaceable bodies, which, for me, reduced the stakes of any tension in the story to zero: who cares if they fail or die when they can simply be reproduced?

So, all in all, my least favourite part of a very good series. The writing’s still snappy, the smart corvids are great, and I loved to see a bit more exploration of the Children-universe, but plot-wise, this one fell flat for me.

Another absolute zinger. Adrian is the Master of his genre, and he gets it right every time. I'd read the first two books in this series so I was well-versed in the spider and Kern universe. But the author ramps it up yet again for the third book where he introduces a third species, the Corvid which joins the 'family of humans (with a big H) and spiders on board. The Corvids have the ability to shapeshift and influence the future of humanity in quite an extraordinary way. Tchaikovsky's books are so detailed that there are times when you have to sit back and trust he is taking you where you need to be. Absolutely superb. Honestly, thought he couldn't get any better but he can and he has. Wild 5-Star Ride.

Thank you to the Publisher and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This should have been an exciting Science Fiction story, but unfortunately I really struggled with this.

I found the story to be disjointed and confusing, with so many characters that just did not seem to tie the story together.

Whether it was because I had not read the previous books in the series I do not know.

This was not for me.

I haven't read the other books in this series, and I really should have, because I really struggled to connect with this book. So, I feel that it is my fault that I struggled with this one I can't slate it because it was my fault that it didn't resonate with me. Hopefully other readers will enjoy it more.

I had a truly wonderful time reading this sequel and I am very excited to be able to recommend a full three books of confusing space goodness to everyone I know.
Full disclosure, I did manage to squeeze in a re-read of Children of Time, I did not manage to get Children of Ruin as well before it was time to pick this up. While the book does a great job of catching you up I still think it'd be worth doing a reread just for the continuity of one particular character (and also you get to reread a great book!). You probably also don't want to just jump into this book without having read either of the previous two books but hopefully that goes without saying.
Children of Memory tackles very similar themes and ideas to the first two books but I definitely felt the space between this book and Children of Ruin - I am assured it is only actually 3 and a half years between them but time really has been an illusion these last few years. Put more simply, I feel like Children of Memory still takes on that idea of non-human sentience but comes at it from a different direction than the 'virus' approach of books one and two. I think that was sensible on Tchaikovsky's part as I know people were concerned that this was going to be another '[INSERT CREATURE HERE} in Space' book. This book, more so than any of the books before, is far more about humanity.
Given the 'human' sections of the previous books were probably my least favourite I was somewhat concerned that I wouldn't like this book as much. But actually saying 'humanity' means a whole host of different things and I wasn't disappointed nor was I bored. I really liked the way this book posed what felt a bit like thought experiments alongside the story and I was definitely left with a lot to think about. Where book one felt like a space adventure and book two had an element of horror about it I felt like this book was edging into some kind of 'scary psychological' territory - no complaints from me except that it did make me question my own reality at several points.
One of the complaints I know people have had about this series is that it can feel a bit overwritten and if that's something that bothered you before I don't know that this book changes that. I embraced it as a 'I'll just let this take me where it will and see where I wash up at the end' kind of book but I can see where some people might feel that 100 pages or so could have been cut to make things a bit pacier. I think the fact that the book is broken up into very small sections makes it more digestible than you might think.
Overall I'll definitely be recommending this to people who liked the previous books and I'm very interested to hear what everyone else thinks about how this book worked out!
I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher - all opinions are my own.

This is a hard book to review - there were some things I loved about this book, but others made me feel that the author was perhaps trying to be too clever, at the risk of turning away the reader. I did think it was a very long book and perhaps could have been reduced by cutting some bits out? However, towards the end the story seemed to tighten up and I much preferred the later parts.
I did think there were some very intriguing and unusual ideas, so full marks for that, but if I gave this book five stars then I couldn't give more for the more outstanding books by this author.

A particularly strong ending (no surprised for Tchaikovsky) but quite a slog at points. It still has the rich world and characters of the previous books but the setting is quite colourless, almost dull. It took me a lot longer to read this than I expected but then as the book heads towards the end, it really picks up the pace and does deliver.

Really happy to have been granted the arc to this 3rd book in the series i really enjoyed.
Children of time was an astonishing book, and the second book was still fine.
I worried about reading this one as i find that i can struggle with Mr Tchaikovsky's style. I find some parts of his books read more like a dry lecture, and the plot slows. Regardless, i have great love for this series, and the 3rd book didn't disappoint. It was a bit different from the other 2 and i still had bits of struggle, but altogether it was another masterpiece from the writer.

Adrian Tchaikovsky returns with yet another complex, super-imaginative, thought-provoking piece of Science Fiction set several millennia into the future, in a distant galaxy, featuring an eclectic cast of species—including humans—in Children of Memory, the third in the Children of Time series.

Ark ship Enkidu, carrying a part of the last dregs of humanity fleeing a toxic, dying earth, has arrived, after travelling for about three thousand years through space, at the orbit of a planet that seems to be the promised land—made habitable by their own distant ancestors out on a terraforming mission aeons ago. Heorest Holt, the captain of the vessel battered by the perilous journey, and his core crew name the planet—with a harsh-but-workable environment—Imir and colonise it with a selection of people from the thousands carried by the ship and whatever technology that could be salvaged. As the little sliver of humanity fights against tremendous odds to survive in the alien planet, it goes through the inescapable cycle of civilisation—starting with almost nothing, progressing through hard work—and a dose of good fortune—to a state of prosperity, and decaying eventually, due to entropy and ill-luck, into a state worse than that at the start.

Meanwhile, Imir catches the attention of a group of explorers—denizens of various planets that the early terraformers got to work upon, with varying results, that have evolved into technologically advanced life forms—on a mission to search for and reach out to other life, travelling across galaxies. The group is made up of three Portiid Spiders, an Octopus, a Human, the uploaded intelligence of ancient scientist Avrana Kern and Miranda—a compound alien organism from planet Nod presently inhabiting the body and persona of a Human, along with a pair of Corvids from a planet populated entirely by those highly evolved birds. The signals emanating from Imir are intriguing to say the least and Miranda, ever inquisitive and eager to experience the new, proposes a very limited expedition to the planet, to see humanity thriving in a remote corner of the universe—the first ever such place the explorers have chanced upon. But the expedition does not go as expected as the explorers are faced with something far greater than their immense intellect and understanding.

Tchaikovsky has been outdoing himself with every book he writes and this one is no exception. The points he makes, the questions he poses, and the scenarios he builds are way beyond the imagination of an average reader and are utterly absorbing. His characters are fantastic and unlike anything I’ve ever read, and his narration is enthralling all the way. Children of Memory is a challenging book to read, with mind-bending concepts and a nonlinear narrative, but is more than adequately rewarding to the alert and persevering reader. Though I must confess I had trouble concentrating through the large servings of philosophy that abound this novel. While Children of Memory works fine as a standalone, I expect that reading the previous couple of books in the series will immensely improve the experience. Somehow, I was under the impression that this is going to be a trilogy, but the ending of this book is suggestive of at least one more volume, which is always welcome!

My gratitude to Pan Macmillan / Tor and Adrian Tchaikovsky for the e-ARC of Children of Memory through NetGalley in exchange for my unbiased review.

Generations on from the events of Children of Ruin, the unlikely alliance of Portiid spiders, humans, Octopus and the Nodan parasitic organism are reaching across space for other sentient life. Aided by the irrepressible Avrana Kern entity, they detect a signal coming from a partially terraformed planet. Children of Memory is the story of that planet and first contact.

I’ve loved the Children of Time series, which is quite ironic considering that had I realised that it centred on a race of spiders I wouldn’t have originally gone near it. This latest instalment loses a great deal by concentrating on the other species and pushing the Portiids to the periphery. I spent much of the novel not sure of what was going on and found the story to be too fragmented to enjoy it.

I received a free reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Publication date – 7th July 2022

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a sequel that stretches away from its predecessors, whilst also maintaining the themes (and some of the characters) of the previous novels. A dark and twisting mystery in a failing colony, a scientist grappling with their own monstrous tendencies and the introduction of sure to be fan favourite Corvids makes this entry hard to miss.

Unlike the two previous novels, this time the novel starts with a failing colony ship from the dying earth, its leaders desperately trying to make a colony on a world barely habitable by kick-starting a small and self sustaining ecosystem. While the colony manages to eke out a hard existence, a mysterious signal nearby on the planet beckons. But the self sustaining ecosystem may be doomed to failure, and paranoia runs through the colony as problems start to be blamed on ‘Seccers’, potentially fictitious ‘others’ who supposedly have it out for them. A young girl called Liff starts to notice inconsistencies and strange people in the town.

Strange people such as Miranda and her crew – these are visitors from the worlds of the previous two books (plus a couple of tag-alongs – more on them later) people with post-scarcity technology studying the colony and trying to figure out how they can – and if they should – help the people without destroying their cultural identity. Miranda is the Nodian discovered in Children of Ruin, the once parasitic life-form that can copy and store the identities and memories of others, now with a new perspective (or several) on how to live without destroying. Miranda is really the name of the Human that allowed herself to be copied by ‘the Interlocuter’ (so called because it can naturally understand the speech of Humans, spider and Octopus) and whose personality it is now trying to live in. With Miranda are Fabian and Portia, two Portiids and Paul, an Octopus. An AI splinter of Avrana Kern is also present, as are the new stars of the series.

Gothi and Gethli are two Corvids whose species inadvertently became part of the ancient Earth terraforming initiative. And they are delightful. A major question of the book revolves around whether or not they count as sentient – which opens up larger questions in of itself. While their species’ story doesn’t feature as heavily as the Portiids, or even that of the Octopodes, Gothi and Gethli get plenty of page time, and their role in the story is quite crucial.

I must admit that I didn’t quite enjoy following this colony as much as I did the exploits of the uplifted spiders or octopodes. Things go about how you’d expect of humanity, and there’s some weirdness going on that means getting a straight timeline takes much longer than you’d expect. In fact, some of the best parts of the novel came after the initial mystery was solved, and I wish more time was spent unravelling the implications of it.

Miranda is a highlight here, an alien vastly different from us, yet with a core curiosity so human-like that it can inhabit a lifelike shell of a person and BE someone else. That inevitably leads to one hell of an identity crisis, and I again have to credit Tchaikovsky’s ability to write non-human intelligences with compassion.

When the revelations do come, they both hit hard and play incredibly well into the themes of the series. I love how no matter how disastrous things get, the characters in these books manage to use their curiosity and ability to understand as a way of generating empathy in themselves and their peers.

One thing I would note is that while the story in this book stands alone, the setting itself is much harder to jump in on at this point, with the events in the last book especially relevant to a character that is in most respects immortal. Miranda’s dark history is integral to the character, and I feel like having read that book gave me an extra level of resonance that being told about the events doesn’t quite bring.

While not my favourite book of the series, Children of Memory is a worthy successor, brilliantly continuing the themes, examining some consequences from the last book, and expanding the setting at the same time. I hope Tchaikovsky doesn’t run out of ideas for this series anytime soon!

Rating: 9/10

As usual in my reviews, I will not rehash the plot...that would be an impossible task anyway!

To fully enjoy this book, you need to have read the others in this series; unfortunately I confused this series with another, and thought I'd read the one before - and as it turned out I hadn't! So I did struggle a little with this book as the plot is complex and moves back and forth in time and place.

However I really enjoyed it, and will now catch up on the ones I've missed.

This is a book for fans of real science fiction (by that I mean rather than fantasy).

My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC. All opinions my own.

This is again another incredibly original and succinct science fiction opus from Adrian Tchaikovsky. Subtly difference from previous books, I found this book possessed an increased challenged of perspective and knowledge from a variety of characters contained within, to really challenge the reader to think and ponder.

Fortunate to read this early via NetGalley, this is a joyous ride into discovery and timelines. Not for the faint heartened, but well worth the journey, as are all of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books. Strong, satisfactory and very, very good.

I spent too long at the beginning of this book trying to figure out what was going on, rather than just letting the story sweep me along on its spiraling, mesmerising, mind-melting mystery. Once I shut down the puzzle-solving part of my brain that is always trying to unravel plot twists before they have even twisted, however, I did enjoy the book, reading faster and faster in my desperation to get to the end of the mystery. While a little disappointed to learn that my initial theory as to what was happening was indeed correct, the journey was enjoyable nonetheless.

The book is confusing at points, though, as the story messes with time and memory to the point that I started to question my own memory while reading, constantly flicking back and forth between the character list and earlier chapters to ensure that I wasn't missing something. All in all, this was probably the weakest book in the 'Children of Time' series for me, but was still a generally strong, well-written sci-fi novel.

I once attended an event at which the author was asked 'why space opera?' On the one hand, 'why not?', but, as Tchaikovsky argued, you can make poignant and relevant comments about society and human nature just as eloquently through space opera as you can through any other genre. Space operas are not just escapism, and this book is the perfect illustration of this argument in its exploration of life from a partly scientific, partly philosophical perspective.

Adrian Tchaikovsky has done it again! Another brilliantly told story in an enthralling universe that weaves an epic tale with amazing characters

I loved Children Of Time, and was a bit cooler towards Children Of Ruin, so this one had the potential to swing the series either way for me. It turns out this isn’t really the right way to look at it. It’s a different beast from those two books, set in the same universe with some returning characters, but the uplift elements are almost incidental. For the first third or so, I thought I was going to be looking at a two-star review. The book initially appeared to be a mess, over obscure and unsympathetic. But soon the realisation came that the author has been putting pieces in place to spring his trap, and as what exactly is going on began to come into focus my enjoyment levels shot up. If you can persevere through the opening then there are worthwhile rewards here.

It’s not a lovable book, suffused as it is with pessimism and a cynical (you might say realistic) view of human nature. But it is a clever one, with an excellent SFnal mystery at its heart. I get the feeling this is one I will enjoy having read more than I did actually reading it.