『CRITIQUE: “Children of Memory” by Adrian Tchaikovsky』のカバーアート

CRITIQUE: “Children of Memory” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

CRITIQUE: “Children of Memory” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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 Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/Children of Memory is the weakest entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s original Children of Time trilogy.1 Tor published this third volume in the U.K. in 2022 and Orbit did so in the United States the next year.2 The trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023—a win Tchaikovsky has declined to claim because of irregularities in the administration of Hugo nominations that year.3The ColonyThe book’s premise resembles certain elements found in Children of Time.4 The ark ship Enkidu, under Captain Heorest Holt, carries its sleeping cargo to a terraformed world.5 In the first book, the terraforming project went wrong, producing a civilization of spiders. Here it goes wrong, producing a world that can support human life, but just barely. The planet Imir is marginal from the start, with soil chemistry not quite lethal to Earth life, but “wrong enough to have all sorts of long-term impacts.”6 The ocean provides no recourse: “There was also a too-big moon, which had its own moon, making the tides a wild riot. This meant settling anywhere near the sea would be a fatal mistake; so much for maritime aquaculture.”7Generations later, Holt’s descendants live in the farming town of Landfall, where equipment is failing and harvests are getting worse.8 A militia keeps order on behalf of “the older Landfall families,” resulting in a community ruled by status and force: “The punching around here only goes one way, and that’s down.”9The fragile ecology the terraformers created is the root of the colony’s decline: “A collapse of the resource web leads to a collapse of infrastructure which leads to the collapse of everything else.”10 Here, “everything else” includes civil society. Landfall’s ruling class needs enemies to maintain order, and when it can’t find real enemies, it invents them. Tchaikovsky captures this stark reality with phrases such as “You defined us by not being them”11 and “…find someone more them than you are, and put the boot in.”12So far, so good. But Landfall is a dull world filled with dull characters, and while Tchaikovsky is skillful enough to convey that dullness convincingly, he’s unsuccessful in writing an interesting story about an uninteresting place.Holt is a decent man worn to a nub, the parts of him “that wanted to scream and beat at the walls … locked away for now.”13 Liff, the main character for much of the story,14 is a clever girl15 who doesn’t receive enough opportunities to make her cleverness count. The townsfolk are a mob in waiting, and little else. The novel forces readers to spend far too much time in their company, waiting for an unsatisfying payoff.It’s not helpful that Tchaikovsky resorts to a plot device that may still make headlines, but which creators have overused in the past quarter-century. Long-time science fiction readers are likely to see it coming, and a twist that the reader anticipates is no longer a twist.The CorvidsJust as the strongest elements of Tchaikovsky’s excellent Children of Ruin were the octopuses and the Nodan organism,16 here they’re the Corvids and the Interlocutor.The Corvids are Gethli and Gothi, a pair of crow-like birds traveling with the strangers,17 and they are the most humorous and most unsettling characters in the book. Each Corvid on its own is a clever animal. Together they’re…more. Their species works in bonded pairs, one partner storing and recalling information while the other analyzes and invents.18 Tchaikovsky depicts this partnership as a single mind emerging from the interaction of two entities. The birds trade “a quickfire rattle of ratchety consonants that serve as thoughts from one side of their shared brain to the other”19—as Tchaikovsky puts it, “In the space between each pair, a mind.”20As with the spiders and octopuses, he knows what he’s talking about. Real corvids have become a major subject of research on animal intelligence, and researchers have documented tool manufacture, caching strategies that take account of which other birds were watching, and apparent planning for the future—abilities that developed independently of the great apes’ and amount to a case of convergent evolution.21 Like many real corvids, those in Children of Memory pair for life. Tchaikovsky turns the pair bond into the species’ seat of cognition.22What makes the Corvids memorable, though, is how they characterize their own cognition. They insist, cheerfully and at length, that they are not conscious. “We’re a mistake, basically,” one of them explains; “…what we really are is a ...
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