Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky - review
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky My rating: 4 of 5 stars I liked it, but it's too much Children of Time, again. Of course zoologist Tchaikovsky made me fall in love with octopeds in this book (or octopi, or this particular kind of crustacean, to share some other words I now learned), like he also did with the jumping spiders (Portia labiata) in Children of Time (CoT). Though I'm sure their fickleness of these creatures would drive me utter mad if I actually had to work with them, or something. But also, like in CoT, that makes it attractive to try to use them as a mirror for humans. What's different about octopeds, of course, is how they have several, independently operating brains, divided between: the crown which houses their personality; and the reach: the brains in the tentacles that can do calculations and other pure rational stuff. The crown, however, is mostly just 'id' and not much ego and superego, if I can use these Freudian terms (I don't thi