CHILDREN OF RUIN
Off to the land of Nod
released OUT NOW! 576 | Hardback/ebook/audiobook
Authors adrian Tchaikovsky Publisher Macmillan
For all that science fiction and fantasy are closely related fields, the odd eyebrow was raised by Adrian Tchaikovsky taking the 2016 Clarke Award for Children Of Time. Tchaikovsky was, after all, a fantasy writer having an away-day from his regular gig, better known as the author of fantasy sequence Shadows Of The Apt.
Which perhaps goes to show how genre categories can limit the imaginations even of genre readers because, as Children Of Ruin proves, should there be any doubt, Tchaikovsky is no hard SF dilettante. Rather, he’s a nerdy hard SF mechanic, a man who, to judge by the Children books, is fascinated by the way the genre enables him to tinker with ideas about how different intelligent species see the universe.
He also seems to be strongly influenced by the collision of grandeur and weirdness that characterised so much space opera around the turn of the millennium. Thus his set-up, which involves a time-split narrative where events from deep history play into the present, capricious spacefaring octopi, and the dangers posed by first contact with a parasitic lifeform, combines big ambition with skin-crawling details.
Yet this is far from a crude horror-in-space novel. Rather, as we see Avrana Kern, an AI whose processing power is partly provided by ants, and her human/arachnoid cohorts arrive in a solar system where humankind once hoped to establish a colony on a terraformed world known as Nod (a failure we also follow), it’s clear Tchaikovsky’s primary interest is in how different kinds of creatures might communicate. A key point being that biology shapes how we see the universe, which in turn shapes how we share our thoughts about the universe – and work together rather than falling into conflict.
That he does this while also conjuring up a sweeping narrative that recalls Peter F Hamilton or Alastair Reynolds at their best should be recommendation enough. Terrific.
Science philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds, which deals with cephalopod intelligence, was a major influence.
Conjures up a sweeping narrative