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 think Tchaikovsky does), compared to humans. But, yeah: aren't we, too, more fickle and driven by self-interest than we'd like to admit?

The arms (reach) of the octopeds can operate independently from the head (crown) and in a comparable way their society is fragmented into independent cells. This gives great freedom to those cells, for instance there's this cell of scientists that do advanced research (far beyond where humans have been able to go). Though also, then, there's a cell that wants to these scientists up, because they don't like what they're doing, because they think it's dangerous (which isn't a crazy idea, really. So just the way decisions are made in this society are different).

I think this all makes for a pretty perfect anarchist society, which our society can learn from.

The society can still make some decisions they all agree on, it should be point out.

So that is the great part of the book.

Less great is that it's the same kind of 'lifting up' of a species, now with these crustaceans, instead of these spiders in CoT. That would be fine, if the rest brought enough new or interesting stuff. And it didn't, not totally.

But first some more stuff I liked, before getting into more spoiler-y stuff:

It was interesting to see more of the human society falling apart. I didn't care too too much about the particular humans living through this. (But they didn't have that big a role, except Senkovi. Who's, I'm pretty sure, a stand-in for Tchaikovsky, btw.)

I liked the alien planet they got stuck on. It reminded me of this recent animated series Scavengers Reign, where they also get stranded in this strange biosphere that they don't understand the underlying logic off. (There's more works like this, of course. For instance I recently read the Jesus Incident, by Frank Herbert, but that wasn't as good, at least in this regard.)

I liked the several little groups of humans and spiders that'd worked on communication between their species.

I liked this one human, from these groups, accidently making a direct connection, through his communication software with the ship's computer.

That ship's computer is, just like in CoT, Avrana Kern. I like her character ('her' or maybe just her, because: sure a computer can be gendered) and I like the little dillemas that come with copying her over-and-over. Like this small example: a Kern that walks around as a robot spider. That doesn't just wants to have her brain read by the main computer, because of a desire for privacy. And even less she wants to be absorbed into a bigger computer, because of a desire for, I guess you could say: life.

Now more plot poilers, what I liked less: the virus on the foreign planet wasn't too interesting: something we've seen before. Maybe the book is self aware of that, because it got pretty funny with this thing I thought of as a funny catch-phrase: "we're going on an adventure". Also it was pretty cool how chapters were written from its perspective.

At the end of the book all the different species are connected into each other: the virus, the octopeds, the spiders, the humans and Kern. I think that makes for an interesting starting point for the next novel. How we got to that point, could have been a bit more engaging, I feel. But I'm still looking forward to the next and final installment in the series.

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