Book Review: Children of Ruin

Long ago, Earth's terraforming program sent ships out to build new homes for humanity among the stars and made an unexpected discovery: a planet with life. But the scientists were unaware that the alien ecosystem was more developed than the primitive life forms originally discovered.

Now, thousands of years later, the Portiids and their Humans have sent an exploration vessel following fragmentary radio signals. They discover a system in crisis, warring factions trying to recover from an apocalyptic catastrophe arising from what the early terraformers awoke all those years before.

The book runs with two alternating storylines: the "present" (which is a joint venture between Portiids and Humans two generations after the events in Children of Time) and the distant past, roughly equivalent to the start of Children of Time. Eventually, the older timeline is advanced until it catches up to the present.

In the old timeline, we're introduced to a group of terraformers who've arrived in a system that, surprisingly, has life in it. Rather than destroy it, the terraformers split up: Half will study the lifeforms of the world (Nod), while the the other half will terraform the next planet out from the host star. Unlike Avrana Kern's expedition in Children of Time, there is no suicide bomber on board. Still, the Luddite faction back on Earth still manages to find a way to derail this batch of terraformers. But that isn't the worst of it, for Nod has an insidious lifeform of its own that threatens to devour everyone it encounters. There's a scene with serious The Thing vibes that I found terrifying.

Meanwhile, the terraformers successfully establish an octopus civilization on the other planet. Tchaikovsky does a fantastic job detailing how a sentient octopus thinks, behaves, and communicates and how their society might function. World building has always been his strong suit, and his ability to get inside alien minds is among the best in sci-fi.

So when the Kern's World expedition arrives, all signs point to some kind of war in progress. A scout ship sent to make contact finds out the hard way what's actually happening. The Humans and Portiids are still trying to iron out the wrinkles in their interspecies communication (vibrations for the spiders, vocalized language for the humans) and now they find that octopuses primarily communicate via color.

The book is a bit of a slow burn, and sometimes it seemed like Tchaikovsky was retreading the same old ground and story points. There were long passages of summarizing, where centuries of the octopus civilization's progress was told in anthropological fashion. It wasn't bad—Tchaikovsky manages to keep it interesting—but it can be dry and pads the word count. I think this book could be 10% shorter. It was at the midway point that the story's pace really picked up. Since I didn't bail, that's proof enough that Tchaikovsky knows what he's doing.

4 stars

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DED