Children of Ruin (2019)
Adrian Tchaikovsky (1972)
565 pages
[Note: although I make it a point to not include spoilers in my reviews, this one discusses the second book in a trilogy, and it’s not possible to write about it without including some context from the first book, Children of Time. So, if you haven’t read that first one yet, I suggest you jump back to my review of it here.]
Generations have passed since, late in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, the Portiids of Kern’s World accepted into their midst the desperate, surviving humans of a forlorn spaceship from a destroyed Earth. To enable these humans to live among them, the Portiids used the human-engineered virus that accelerated their own development to remove the humans’ evolutionary aversion to spiders – and so allow the two species to co-exist.
Working together, the Portiids and humans have integrated the two civilizations’ technologies to create spaceships capable of interstellar flight. Early in the second book of this trilogy,
Children of Ruin, a mixed crew of Portiids and humans launch a spaceship toward a distant star system from which they have detected a signal – one that seems to indicate a potential remnant of Old Earth civilization that remains among the stars.
Arriving at this new system, the crew encounter radically altered Old Earth technology operated by a civilization that they struggle to communicate with. The rudimentary contact they do establish quickly goes dangerously awry for reasons the Portiids and humans strive mightily to understand. Only slowly do they come to realize that they’ve inadvertently tripped into the middle of a bitter, inter-civilizational conflict, one that now also threatens them. Having revealed their existence, can they survive, and also prevent the conflict from reaching back to imperil Kern’s World?
Tchaikovsky tells the story as alternating sections of chapters, those set in the past that detail how the human terraforming mission to this new system led to the situation the Portiids and humans now encounter, and those set in the present, in which the consequences of the past developments play out. As opposed to a simpler, linear narrative, this structure helps build and hold the tension in the story as, like the Portiids and humans who have arrived in the system, readers only slowly come to know the nature and depth of the threat.
This second entry in the trilogy doesn’t have quite the surprise power of what Tchaikovsky created for the first story, which wowed me from the opening paragraphs. But it definitely reaffirms him as a master of world-building, as I’ve described in my reviews of that book, his wonderful
Elder Race, and the thought-provoking short story collection
Terrible Worlds: Revolutions (my reviews linked to at right).
As strange as the arriving humans found the Portiid’s of Kern’s World, the civilizations in this new star system are even more alien, and Tchaikovsky thoroughly and brilliantly lays out their evolution. To his credit as a storyteller, he eschews the easy way out of something like, say, a universal translator in the old
Star Trek series (I can still hear my dad asking, “how is it all the aliens can speak English?”); Tchaikovsky’s human and Portiid characters spend significant effort, and often make only halting progress, at communicating with each other and the new species they encounter.
Centering this trilogy on the interactions between vastly dissimilar species means that Tchaikovsky has set himself the formidable task of wading into ever more bewildering depths with the introduction and evolution of each new civilization, and the second book concludes with biological and technological advancements that pale even in comparison with what has come to that point. Hard to even imagine where he could take all this in the third book – which, I suppose, is the pleasure of it…
Other notes and information:
The story includes one of the best lines I’ve read in a while:
[he] had been absolutely convinced of the rightness of his own actions, and it had all been wholly amusing until it had become utterly fucked up. (51)
It reminds me a bit of the quote from John Pike, Director Space Policy Project of the Fed. of Amer. Scientists, responding to a question on Mir repair work some decades ago:
If they go in there and do their work and all goes according to plan we'll conclude it was relatively straightforward. If they all end up dead, we'll conclude it was very hazardous.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
No comments:
Post a Comment