Children of Ruin
The astonishing sequel to Children of Time, the award-winning novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Thousands of years ago, Earth's terraforming program took to the stars. On the world they called Nod, scientists discovered alien life -- but it was their mission to overwrite it with the memory of Earth. Then humanity's great empire fell, and the program's decisions were lost to time. Aeons later, humanity and its new spider allies detected fragmentary radio signals between the stars. They dispatched an exploration vessel, hoping to find cousins from old Earth. But those ancient terraformers woke something on Nod better left undisturbed.
Stats for nerds
41recommend
72mentions
63people
2019–2026years
63% recommend35% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- And then read Children of Ruin, Children of Memory and finally Children of Strife.
Every book of the series is amazing in its own way.
- If you haven't read it, you might enjoy Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series. It's fiction which explores different intelligences, with the second novel[0] dealing specifically with octopuses.
- Children of Ruin is the second book in a scifi series which contains sentient octopods. The author did a marvellous job of laying out the different ways the creatures think and learn. It was very well thought out.
- Tchaikovsky has written some of the best books I have ever read like Children of Time and Children of Ruin and also some of the worst books I have ever read like Cage of Souls.
- You might enjoy Children Of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's an imagination of what a spacefaring civilisation of octopuses might look like.
I won't hype it to the moon. I enjoyed Children Of Ruin more, which centres on spiders. But it's a decent read if you like SF.
- Interesting. I basically feel the opposite - I love Hamilton's ideas and plotting but really think he writes characters that don't feel real, they feel too much like archetypes. I can think of a few exceptions to this, but almost all of his characters feel like programmed automatons to me. And boy has he MISSED BIG when writing female characters at times.
Unlike the others, I think Tchaikovsky's best writing is in Children of Ruin. I know it's not as popular as Children of Time, but I admired the way he didn't rinse/repeat and instead created a wholly different view of humanity's legacy intersecting with alien life. I though the "antagonist" in that book was far more alien and creative.
