From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] My review of _Children of Memory_
Date: Fri, 12 May 2023 21:22:11 -0400 (EDT)

Here's a copy of the review I gave at the May 12th PRSFS meeting:

In February and March I reviewed Adrian Tchaikovsky's _Children of
Time_ and _Children of Ruin_.  Tonight I'm reviewing the third book
in the trilogy, the 500-page _Children of Memory_.

As I said before, the back story is that human civilization was
destroyed on Earth by war, and in space by a computer virus broadcast
as part of that war.  In addition to colonies elsewhere in our solar
system, there were a handful of relativistic interstellar terraforming
missions, all of which were more or less wrecked by the virus.

After the next ice age, civilization on Earth was rebuilt on a more
modest scale, but life had become unsustainable, so the last survivors
of Earth sent at least two one-way multi-century-long missions to the
possibly terraformed worlds.  The first novel involved a visit to a
planet inhabited by uplifted spiders and ants.  The second involved a
visit to a planet that had been inhabited by uplifted octopuses for a
while, but, except for some survivors in space, the octopuses had been
wiped out by virus-like true aliens from another planet in that solar
system.

This third novel is set set several centuries later.  A civilization
of those spiders, ants, octopuses, viruses, AIs, and humans is unified
and more advanced than any previous civilization.  They have faster-
than-light travel and the ability to upload, download, and cross-load
minds.  For instance if a spider wants to try being a human, or vice
versa, they can.  If someone wants to both stay and home and travel,
they can do both by duplicating themselves.

They visit two more attempted terraformed worlds.  The first one
was unusual in that when the terraformers reached it before the war,
it already had an oxygen atmosphere despite having no life, due to
photolysis of water vapor in the upper atmosphere.  (As an aside, I
hold the controversial opinion that that's also the source of Earth's
oxygen atmosphere.)

As such, the terraformers on that planet managed to survive the
computer virus that wrecked their technology, though their colony
died out after a century or so, mostly because the planet was full of
carcinogens and other nasty chemicals.  They didn't have the uplift
nanovirus, but a species of ravens managed to uplift themselves,
and to do so before the last humans died off.  The birds kept human
language and civilization going, but they were very imitative and
never came up with any new ideas.  Also, individual ravens are
profoundly dysfunctional, but each mated pair of them comprises one
functional intelligence.

Contrast this with the ants, in which it takes millions of individuals
to have one mind; octopuses, in which each individual has nine minds;
and viruses, in which every connected group is one mind, remembers
everything its ancestors ever knew, and shares all memories with any
other virus group it had ever met or split off from.

A mated pair of ravens join the crew as they travel to another solar
system, yet another that may have been partially terraformed before
the war that wrecked human civilization and the subsequent ice age.
That's where most of the action in this novel takes place.

They find that there's a small human outpost on this planet.  They
soon determine that it's only a few centuries old, having been founded
by another ship of cryopreserved refugees from the post-ice-age Earth.
Unfortunately, they had found very little variety of life on that
planet, and they didn't have much to add to it.  Their colony ends up
with only a handful of species.  For instance they use pigs not just
for meat, but also for milk, to plow fields, and as guard dogs.  And
there's only one species of trees, one species of fish (which soon
goes extinct), and no birds.

The ecology of their colony is collapsing.  Its technology has already
collapsed, which is why they need to plow fields with pigs rather than
with tractors.

The visitors decide to all take human forms and to infiltrate, to
learn more about what's going on.  They pretend to be refugees from
one of the dying outermost farms in the colony.  Unfortunately, the
colonists there are superstitious and paranoid, believing that there
are infiltrators who are sabotaging the colony.

The two most important characters are Miranda, one of the visitors who
is part human woman but mostly virus, who becomes a schoolteacher, and
Liff, an adolescent girl colonist, who becomes Miranda's most important
student.  (The author really likes to have female characters.)

There's no magic in this novel, but Liff doesn't know that.  She's
superstitious, and believes in Outsiders, and that there's a witch
living in a cave in the woods.  And she turns out to be sort of
correct.

Then it gets weird.  There are major continuity errors.  Liff
remembers the founding of the colony, even though it was centuries in
the past.  And she remembers being the last person left alive in the
dying colony, though that hasn't happened yet (and hopefully never
will).  Also, when one of the visitors says to the others that they
can sell equipment from their abandoned farm, one of them is puzzled
because being from an abandoned farm is only their cover story,
there's no actual farm.  And another is puzzled because their cover
story has nothing to do with any farm, but was that they were brought
down to the surface from the colonists' starship in the colonists'
last round trip to that starship.

Of course the continuity errors are deliberate by the author.
Otherwise he wouldn't have the characters notice and comment on them.
Everything is explained in the end.  The satisfying twist ending made
me want to immediately start re-reading the novel from the beginning.

It was nice getting to meet Avrana Kern again.  She's one of a tiny
number of people left over from the pre-war civilization, and the
only character who appears in all three novels.  She's pretty much
a franchise; every group gets to have a copy of her.

My one complaint is the faster-than-light travel.  It's not necessary
for the plot, so I think it should have been left out.  It's like
Chekhov's gun, i.e. a gun should never appear in a play unless it's
important to the plot.  Since FTL travel implies the possibility of
time travel, I mistakenly thought it had something to do with the
continuity errors, like in F.M. Busby's _All These Earths_, in which
FTL travel has the side effect of slipping you into a slightly
different parallel world.  That's not what's happening here.

I enjoyed this novel, and hope there will be more in the series.

As before, I'd like to discuss it in greater detail with anyone who
has read it.