Children of Ruin, Children of Memory – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Fuck, more of these? I don’t have it in me to take these reviews to seriously. Bellow be ramblings:

I saw Children of Ruin in the wilds somewhere, and I figured why not. I didn’t have bad memories of the first one, I had severely incomplete memories of the first one. For a book of two intertwined narratives, I only remembered the spider bits. Those bits were interesting, and when Children of Ruin reminded me that there was a whole other bit to the first book, I felt lost for s surprisingly long time.

I think this one was a little more interesting than the first. A few weeks after reading it and I do remember a few more of the details compared to the first. The whole things with the Cephalopods did feel distinct enough than what he did with the spiders, but there was something Tchaikovsky to it. The two books feel like different meats cooked in the same curry.

I won’t sleep well tonight unless I complain loudly about the part of this book where he glosses over the linguistic challenges of contact with an alien race. It annoyed me in a way that nothing would until, a few months later, the movie version of Project Hail Mary would fuck it up even worse. There seem to be a certain subset of scientifically minded people who seem to think that linguistic complexity is some kind of solved problem, that you can just plug into an equation and you get a translation.

There was maybe a two or three month hiatus between my reading the second book and the third, and I think at some point my brain really checked out with it. It really felt like it was going to be just more of what we have already had with the other books. And while it wasn’t, I am not sure what I got was better. The last 10% or so of the book seemed like a tell-not-show exposition dump of what happened in the first 90%. If the author felt a need to put this into the book, I feel like maybe I wasn’t to blame for not having followed along too well.

Children of Strife, the forth book, is out now. I don’t think I can be bothered with it. Life is short.