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A review by beaconatnight
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky
4.0
The two previous novels in Adrian Tchaikovsky's most famous series, Children of Time and Children of Ruin, had been epic space operas. Children of Memory is more reserved in scope. It tells the mostly self-contained story of how the crew of an ark ship that left the dying Earth more than two thousand years ago desperately tries to settle down on the planet of Imir. The focus is on the mystery that slowly unravels throughout the story.
Like Nod, Damaskus, and Kern's World, Imir was once designated for the Old Earth terraforming project. Unlike the latter, the process was never completed. Still, when war and excessive resource usage had made Earth mostly uninhabitable, humanity sent out its ark ships in hope of settlement on different worlds. One of them, the Enkidu set sails for Imir. Eventually, it's among the very few spaceships that actually reach their destination.
I was surprised by the story's strong supernatural dimension. Of course you never truly believe in the mythical interpretations of what is going on. But for me it was still very intriguing to explore what was really going on. They are best introduced with respect to the two main protagonists whose actions drive the plot forward.
One is Miranda who had once been a human that gifted her thoughts and memories to the Nodan parasite to be replicated. Our hero in the story is a copy of the human that once lived. It's clear very early on that she as well as other old acquaintances – the octopus Paul and two spiders, the engineer Fabian and the hunter Portia – somehow infiltrated the human settlement on Imir. Puzzlingly, they appear to live as humans among humans. Even more baffling, this strange fact is never explained or even openly acknowledged. Are they parasite replicas created to animate engineered human bodies?
On Imir Miranda becomes the teacher of a teenage girl called Liff. She thinks of herself as the granddaughter of Heorest Holt, the captain of the ark ship that landed on Imir. This fact in itself is already confusing as the timeframe doesn't seem to fit. By her time, agriculture, forests, and livestock have made life on Imir possible; yet, when Holt and the core crew first set foot on the planet it was evident that the terraforming process was interrupted at an early stage. It's very unlikely that they made this much progress in only a generation or two. So the question is, how much time has passed since their first arrival?
The arrival too involved another mystery yet to be fully disclosed. Holt and his lover came across some signal. They weren't able to figure out its meaning, yet it appeared very likely that there was a significant pattern – and that the source of the signal was alien in nature. In Children of Ruin there was First Contact with genuinely alien species on Nod (the parasite among others). Might they have come across another intelligent being?
Even years after their arrival, Holt still searched for the signal's origin. Some of his peers gradually began to think that he became mad in old age. Still, there were rumors that something was out there in the hills or woods. The children of the community saw these ideas in the light of their fairy tales. In an early chapter Liff dreams (or is it a dream) that her grandfather left them to live with the Witch in the woods. When she tires to follow him she comes across her familiars – two talking ravens that are capable to transform themselves into human beings.
Of course, the birds are yet another species uplifted by the familiar nanovirus, and I absolutely loved them. I have a strong interest in computational linguistics and in the question of what kinds of problems can be solved computationally, and the new seemingly intelligent player puts a hilarious twist on these issues. When talking to (other) intelligent interlocutors the birds react with responses that appear fully appropriate at the given point of the conversation. Yet, the sense remains that all they do is complex parroting, that there is no essential difference to what their non-enhanced ancestors did back on Earth. Throughout the book characters asks whether the birds truly understand what it is they hear and say.
This poses the question whether they really are intelligent. It seems clear that the behaviorist idea of intelligence – that certain kinds of behavior, like using language or solving problems , demonstrate the intelligence of the acting being – misses the crucial genuinely psychological dimension. We expect the behavior to be the output of genuine thought processes. Yet, there is some evidence that our own capacity to speak and understand language are facilitated by innate grammatical knowledge somehow encoded (and hardcoded) into our neurological makeup. That is, the human capability to use language is essentially computational, too.
However, some worries remain. The birds express their belief that there are no genuinely intelligent beings. In their own case, the nanovirus turned them into exceptional pattern-matching tools (as they call themselves) and gave them the storage capacity to obtain the data thus received. From this they extrapolate whatever is appropriate to say at a given point in a conversation. That is, they are basically a biological version of ChatGPT.
The other fascinating topic closely connected with the overall mystery is the question of what is (really) real and the nature of reality itself. The big twists in the final chapters reveal that Kern, Miranda and the birds were trapped in a simulation. Intuitively, the experience they had only seemed real (but were not). Their main question is whether Liff and/or Liff's experiences were real.
For the sake of the argument it's probably fair to assume that, for the entity in the simulation, the experiences were indistinguishable from what they would have been had she been living in the real world. But from an outsider's perspective it might be relevant to distinguish between different environments in which the simulation takes place. The plot itself discusses two different scenarios.
In the first scenario – the one originally presented to the reader (in Part XI) as what really happened – the Enkidu landed on Imir. For some generations, the community struggled to survive, but eventually it becomes clear that the planet won't be able to sustain them. Coincidentally, Liff is the very last survivor before she dies too. For whatever reason, the simulation engine then recreates these events over and over again. The Liff in the simulation was in some sense a copy of the real life that once lived in Landfall.
In the book's final twist it's revealed that the crew never actually made it. There never was a real life; all we can say is that, contrafactually,, there would have been a Liff had things been different. Perhaps, this is exactly what the simulation engine is after, to identify and realize possible scenarios close to what happens in the actual world. It's worth noting that Miranda, a parasite replica that animates an engineered human body, thinks of herself as the real Miranda; and that Avrana Kern, the AI that resulted from the memories and thought patterns of the original scientist and that existed in this form for centuries, thinks of herself as the real Avrana Kern. Does it make a difference that, in this scenario, Liff would not be a copy of an entity perhaps more rightly called real?
I thought that, at least for the most part, the plot itself was quite gripping, too. Bigger reveals await the reader at every corner and there are again some visually striking moments. For instance, I enjoyed their arrival on Rourke where they are suddenly attacked by thousands of seemingly intelligent birds. There was also the scene were the intruders are hanged on the First Tree turned gallows before they suddenly turn into the horrifying creatures the really are.
There were some obvious shortcomings, though. The book is already shorter than the predecessors, but I still felt there was an simulation iteration or two that didn't really add too much to the overall picture. What bothered me even more than in the two previous novels were the extremely lackluster minor characters.
It's probably fair to say that there were quite a few incarnations of Fabian and Portia that had been little more than a name and a job designation; but here they are literally that. Other than the discussion about Tchaikovsky's of the Prime Directive, which Miranda could have had with anyone, they are barely present in the story at all. In the chapters set before their landing on Imir they are annoyingly disinterested in taking any action at all. Why would they even bother to join the crew if they were almost completely indifferent to the planet and its civilization?
Thematically, Children of Memory is perhaps the strongest in the series, yet, even if the plot itself is not quite as tight. I was truly captivated by the overall mystery and I'm sure the final reveal will stay with me for a long time. So, if you felt Children of Ruin was too much of the same – this is something very different, and very excitingly so!
Rating: 4/5
Like Nod, Damaskus, and Kern's World, Imir was once designated for the Old Earth terraforming project. Unlike the latter, the process was never completed. Still, when war and excessive resource usage had made Earth mostly uninhabitable, humanity sent out its ark ships in hope of settlement on different worlds. One of them, the Enkidu set sails for Imir. Eventually, it's among the very few spaceships that actually reach their destination.
I was surprised by the story's strong supernatural dimension. Of course you never truly believe in the mythical interpretations of what is going on. But for me it was still very intriguing to explore what was really going on. They are best introduced with respect to the two main protagonists whose actions drive the plot forward.
One is Miranda who had once been a human that gifted her thoughts and memories to the Nodan parasite to be replicated. Our hero in the story is a copy of the human that once lived. It's clear very early on that she as well as other old acquaintances – the octopus Paul and two spiders, the engineer Fabian and the hunter Portia – somehow infiltrated the human settlement on Imir. Puzzlingly, they appear to live as humans among humans. Even more baffling, this strange fact is never explained or even openly acknowledged. Are they parasite replicas created to animate engineered human bodies?
On Imir Miranda becomes the teacher of a teenage girl called Liff. She thinks of herself as the granddaughter of Heorest Holt, the captain of the ark ship that landed on Imir. This fact in itself is already confusing as the timeframe doesn't seem to fit. By her time, agriculture, forests, and livestock have made life on Imir possible; yet, when Holt and the core crew first set foot on the planet it was evident that the terraforming process was interrupted at an early stage. It's very unlikely that they made this much progress in only a generation or two. So the question is, how much time has passed since their first arrival?
The arrival too involved another mystery yet to be fully disclosed. Holt and his lover came across some signal. They weren't able to figure out its meaning, yet it appeared very likely that there was a significant pattern – and that the source of the signal was alien in nature. In Children of Ruin there was First Contact with genuinely alien species on Nod (the parasite among others). Might they have come across another intelligent being?
Even years after their arrival, Holt still searched for the signal's origin. Some of his peers gradually began to think that he became mad in old age. Still, there were rumors that something was out there in the hills or woods. The children of the community saw these ideas in the light of their fairy tales. In an early chapter Liff dreams (or is it a dream) that her grandfather left them to live with the Witch in the woods. When she tires to follow him she comes across her familiars – two talking ravens that are capable to transform themselves into human beings.
Of course, the birds are yet another species uplifted by the familiar nanovirus, and I absolutely loved them. I have a strong interest in computational linguistics and in the question of what kinds of problems can be solved computationally, and the new seemingly intelligent player puts a hilarious twist on these issues. When talking to (other) intelligent interlocutors the birds react with responses that appear fully appropriate at the given point of the conversation. Yet, the sense remains that all they do is complex parroting, that there is no essential difference to what their non-enhanced ancestors did back on Earth. Throughout the book characters asks whether the birds truly understand what it is they hear and say.
This poses the question whether they really are intelligent. It seems clear that the behaviorist idea of intelligence – that certain kinds of behavior, like using language or solving problems , demonstrate the intelligence of the acting being – misses the crucial genuinely psychological dimension. We expect the behavior to be the output of genuine thought processes. Yet, there is some evidence that our own capacity to speak and understand language are facilitated by innate grammatical knowledge somehow encoded (and hardcoded) into our neurological makeup. That is, the human capability to use language is essentially computational, too.
However, some worries remain. The birds express their belief that there are no genuinely intelligent beings. In their own case, the nanovirus turned them into exceptional pattern-matching tools (as they call themselves) and gave them the storage capacity to obtain the data thus received. From this they extrapolate whatever is appropriate to say at a given point in a conversation. That is, they are basically a biological version of ChatGPT.
The other fascinating topic closely connected with the overall mystery is the question of what is (really) real and the nature of reality itself. The big twists in the final chapters reveal that Kern, Miranda and the birds were trapped in a simulation. Intuitively, the experience they had only seemed real (but were not). Their main question is whether Liff and/or Liff's experiences were real.
For the sake of the argument it's probably fair to assume that, for the entity in the simulation, the experiences were indistinguishable from what they would have been had she been living in the real world. But from an outsider's perspective it might be relevant to distinguish between different environments in which the simulation takes place. The plot itself discusses two different scenarios.
In the first scenario – the one originally presented to the reader (in Part XI) as what really happened – the Enkidu landed on Imir. For some generations, the community struggled to survive, but eventually it becomes clear that the planet won't be able to sustain them. Coincidentally, Liff is the very last survivor before she dies too. For whatever reason, the simulation engine then recreates these events over and over again. The Liff in the simulation was in some sense a copy of the real life that once lived in Landfall.
In the book's final twist it's revealed that the crew never actually made it. There never was a real life; all we can say is that, contrafactually,, there would have been a Liff had things been different. Perhaps, this is exactly what the simulation engine is after, to identify and realize possible scenarios close to what happens in the actual world. It's worth noting that Miranda, a parasite replica that animates an engineered human body, thinks of herself as the real Miranda; and that Avrana Kern, the AI that resulted from the memories and thought patterns of the original scientist and that existed in this form for centuries, thinks of herself as the real Avrana Kern. Does it make a difference that, in this scenario, Liff would not be a copy of an entity perhaps more rightly called real?
I thought that, at least for the most part, the plot itself was quite gripping, too. Bigger reveals await the reader at every corner and there are again some visually striking moments. For instance, I enjoyed their arrival on Rourke where they are suddenly attacked by thousands of seemingly intelligent birds. There was also the scene were the intruders are hanged on the First Tree turned gallows before they suddenly turn into the horrifying creatures the really are.
There were some obvious shortcomings, though. The book is already shorter than the predecessors, but I still felt there was an simulation iteration or two that didn't really add too much to the overall picture. What bothered me even more than in the two previous novels were the extremely lackluster minor characters.
It's probably fair to say that there were quite a few incarnations of Fabian and Portia that had been little more than a name and a job designation; but here they are literally that. Other than the discussion about Tchaikovsky's of the Prime Directive, which Miranda could have had with anyone, they are barely present in the story at all. In the chapters set before their landing on Imir they are annoyingly disinterested in taking any action at all. Why would they even bother to join the crew if they were almost completely indifferent to the planet and its civilization?
Thematically, Children of Memory is perhaps the strongest in the series, yet, even if the plot itself is not quite as tight. I was truly captivated by the overall mystery and I'm sure the final reveal will stay with me for a long time. So, if you felt Children of Ruin was too much of the same – this is something very different, and very excitingly so!
Rating: 4/5