Children of Ruin

De: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Narrado por: Mel Hudson

The astonishing sequel to Children of Time, the award-winning novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.

Thousands of years ago, Earth's terraforming program took to the stars. On the world they called Nod, scientists discovered alien life - but it was their mission to overwrite it with the memory of Earth. Then humanity's great empire fell, and the program's decisions were lost to time.

Aeons later, humanity and its new spider allies detected fragmentary radio signals between the stars. They dispatched an exploration vessel, hoping to find cousins from old Earth.

But those ancient terraformers woke something on Nod better left undisturbed.

And it's been waiting for them.

For more from Adrian Tchaikovsky, check out:
Children of Time

©2019 Adrian Tchaikovsky (P)2019 Hachette Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Children of Ruin is wonderful - big, thinky SF that feels classic without being mired in the past, absolutely crammed with fun ideas. Anyone who likes sweeping, evolutionary-scale stories will love this." (Django Wexler)

"A novel of sublime plot twists and spectacular set pieces, all underpinned by great ideas. And it is crisply modern - but with the sensibility of classic science fiction. Asimov or Clarke might have written this. A hugely satisfying sequel." (Stephen Baxter)

"Magnificent. This is the big stuff - the really big stuff. Rich in wisdom and Humanity (note the 'H'), with a Stapledonian sweep and grandeur. Books like this are why we read science-fiction." (Ian McDonald)

Worth every second

The best sci-fi I've listened to in a long time. Possibly ever. Beautiful. Hopeful. Empathetic. Everything you've wanted from Star Trek but better and delivered in potent tight narrative with lovable characters. I hope there's another!

Incredibly Good!

Wow, what a storyline and concept! Great book made even better by Mel Hudson’s brilliant narration! Highly recommended!

Simply amazing continuation of the series.

The first book in this series was amazing. This book gets even better. The author is truly talented at perspective building from a wide and largely unfamiliar point of view from other species and cognative architectures. Easily one of my favorite scifi stories of all time.

Great storytelling!

I didn't think it would be as good as Children of Time but it surprised me. I enjoyed it very much.

loved it.

This book could be read as a stand alone but is an excellent continuation and follow up to " Children of Time ". Follow the human race through thousands of years of adventure, technacacy, and ultimately war and self annihilation. As man spread throughout the stars no life was found, so the planets were seeded and infected with the human spark of intelligence. More planets than grains of sand on earth but precious few suited to humanity's need. This posses only a delay for terraforming to take affect. Will mankind survive and be able to live in peace with their children...

love the idea of a long lasting legacy of mankind

This series explores a mind stretching approach to alien societies and how we helped create them.

Communicating with the Alien

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2015) depicts the collision of a civilization of uplifted sentient spiders with some human generation ship explorers looking for worlds to colonize after earth has been destroyed. That book’s depiction of spider culture is fascinating, its themes regarding the need to talk to rather than attack the Other are fine, it achieves flights of sf sublime, its plot construction is suspenseful, and its characters are appealing.

All those good features are on display in the sequel, Children of Ruin (2019), where Tchaikovsky spreads his imaginative wings, introducing to go with the spiders and humans and their AI not one but two new alien cultures—an octopoid civilization and a sentient slime-mold analogue. I really like his desire and ability in his fantasy and science fiction to write from the points of view of very different kinds of characters and species and life forms, all with different ways of communicating, thinking, feeling, learning, living, etc.

Tchaikovsky runs two main plot strands together here: in the past a human space-traveling, terraforming team from earth arrives at a system and finds two possible planets to tinker with, after which they learn that earth-based humanity has violently self-destructed; and in the present thousands of years after the past plot line (and just after the close of the first novel) a joint spider-human-AI team of space explorers comes upon the system discovered long ago by the terraformers. The past chapters progress chronologically up to the present ones with ever greater suspense as the terraformers encounter an indigenous, microscopic, self-evolving, group-mind parasitic life alien life form wanting to go on an adventure by riding new vehicles (like human beings), while the spider-human-AI space explorers in the present stumble upon the results of that past encounter.

The novel interestingly depicts the challenges of communicating with the alien, as the humans traveling with the spiders are trying to learn how to better translate the spiders’ feet tapping and palp manipulating into words via technology and empathy, when they stumble upon the octopode civilization that’s resulted from Terran octopi having been uplifted and released upon an oceanic world, and both spiders and humans need to learn how to interpret the octopi’s color- and tentacle- and emotion-based language asap. Time is pressing, because the parasite group mind (whose chapters are narrated as “we”) is working towards their “adventure” in what appears to be monstrous way.

It’s cool watching how all this develops! What the alien slime mold does to its hosts and how it replicates them from random detritus is horrifying, but is it really a dangerous parasite or a catalyst for symbiotic enrichment? How much of a host it alters needs to remain intact in order to retain its identity? How much of a human mind must be uploaded into an AI in order to retain its identity? Is it better to be happy in a group or unhappy alone? Is it possible to ever really understand an alien species?

The novel develops themes about identity, consciousness, communication, copies vs. originals, storytelling, exploring, and the Other, especially stressing the importance of being open minded enough to try hard enough to communicate with the other, no matter how alien and monstrous they may seem to us or we to them.

Tchaikovsky writes a page turning story by generally ignoring mundane details like eating, eliminating, sleeping, and making love etc. in favor of intense situations and by starting chapters in mid-crises involving the life or death or metamorphosis of individuals or their cultures and by ending chapters with cliffhangers.

He can write vivid, weird, suspenseful, and sublime sf:

“She [the AI Avrana Kern] is nothing but a copy of a copy of a copy rebuilt by spiders and filled with ants.”

“There were lakes in the desert, though of what was unclear. They leapt at the eye from the dull brown expanse, yellow, ferrous red, the blue-green of copper compounds, often concentric rings of one unlikely, toxic-looking color within another and then another. They looked like waste pools from some factory about to be shut down by the environmental lobby, their shores crusted with glittering crystals. The sight was beautiful, yet a poster child for something inimical to human life. The display recorded a temperature of sixty-one degrees centigrade.”

“She calls out to Portia again, feels the spider’s legs curve about her body, Portia’s underside clasping against her back in a futile attempt to conserve heat. Both their suits strain with the chill. Heaters that would have coped in the insulated cold of space are losing the battle against the conductive cold of the swirling water, and the spearheads of the ice forest grow closer and closer.”

And his ironic-humorous-bleak tone is neat. When a human researcher called Meshner tells his arachnid colleague Fabian that they don’t want to fry his brain (by downloading too alien an experience from Fabian to Meshner’s cranial implant), Fabian says something like, “as tasty as that image is, we’d better be careful,” and Meshner wonders if Fabian is making a human joke or saying a spider idiom!

While his humans are like straight men, he imagines fascinating details on Portiid spider culture (gender bias for females and against males, transmission of experiences and information by the sharing of chemicals), as well as on Octopode culture: unorthodox problem solving, spaceship names like the Profundity of Depth and the Shell that Echoes Only, independently acting arms, frequent mind changing: “Rigid certainty is anathema to their mind. They would never trust a leader who nailed his or herself to any one issue or belief. Such dogmatism would be truly alien to them.”

This novel, then, is a first contact story (from the points of view of all sides when a number of mutually alien life forms meet for the first time), a terraforming story, and a human evolution story. It's a little like Bear’s Blood Music, Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost,” and Banks’ Culture novels. I really like the novels by Tchaikovsky's I've read so far, Redemption's Blade, The Children of Time, and now Children of Ruin.

The audiobook reader Mel Hudson is great.

Really Good But...

The subject and premise were very interesting and fresh, the narrator is top notch; I could listen to her all day. However, the story was just a tad to clever by half. So many characters, and concepts were thrown into this otherwise engaging story that I personally found myself very lost at times. That is not to say the book isn't worth a listen, but in this instance I just couldn't focus for all the detail.

Great journey of a book

I was often a bit lost and confused with the story and characters... but that's not a bad thing.

Outstanding sci-fi

Well-written sci-fi with resonant characters and a superb reading performance. I’m finding this series very enjoyable.