Children of Memory
Sequel to Children of Ruin. On Imir, Captain Holt founded a hopeful new colony on an empty world. But generations later, his descendants are struggling to survive. As harvests worsen and equipment fails, strangers appear in a town where everyone knows their neighbour. Now the community fears it's being observed - that they're not alone. And they'd be right. Explorers from the stars have come, in secret, to help. Confident of their superior technology, they begin to study their long-lost cousins from Earth. Yet the visitors aren't the only watchers. When the starfarers discover the scale of their mistake, it will be far too late to escape.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
22mentions
22people
2022–2026years
41% recommend50% neutral9% 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.
- I don't think LLMs are conscious. But of course to say that definitively you have to define consciousness, and then you quickly dig yourself into a deep hole, which is why I can't say anything but "meh" to someone who is so keen to go on the record to say "absolutely not".
Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaikovsky's conception of the Ravens? The Ravens are excellent analysts but they themselves insist that they are not conscious, and then go on to say that we (humans) aren't really either...
Of course humans are conscious, because just about the only thing we can all agree on about consciousness is that it's a thing we have. Nowadays many of us also agree that a lot or all other mammals, and perhaps birds, also have that thing. But they don't have sophisticated abstract language, which LLMs do. So consciousness is something having to do with embodiment and feelings, not language and higher reasoning. Maybe I'm a chimpanzee with an LLM add-on, then?
It seems that by creating LLMs we've already solved the harder problem of making "AGI". Now we just have to give them an embodiment add-on so that they can have an independent will and then Ted Chiang will have to shut up? But therein lies the peril, doesn't it?
- If you like the idea of smart corvids, Adrian Tchaikovsky's scifi novel "The Children of Memory" is a fun read.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60850767-children-of-...
- For me, Children of Ruin had more of a horror focus to it and left me with much more icky feelings than the brilliant positivity I felt at the end of the first book. It was still well done, though.
I agree that Children of Memory is not very good, mostly because it repeats itself so much. That could've been handled differently while still advancing the plot. I LOVE the overall concept, and the author's skills describing Gothi and Gethli's unique kind of intelligence was great, so I was okay with it overall... but too much of it was just a slog. First book is by far the best in my opinion as well.
- Sci-fi nerd recommendations follow.
I binged the entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. The cover, & the fact that it was on Kindle Unlimited, made me think it was probably cheap crap, but I was impressed with how well-written it was, and how much I empathized with the characters. (I probably should have read it slower; by the last two books, I was just flowing with the text, not paying as much attention to the overarching plot.)
Heinlein's "Orphans of the Sky" was pretty bad. So much early scifi is considered great because it's groundbreaking, writing about things nobody else has before. The concept of a generation ship was pretty new at the time Heinlein was writing it, and it has some very interesting concepts, but the book has some really bad problems. If you've read it, you know; if you haven't, and decide to, you'll see it for yourself.
I binged a few Brandon Sanderson books. The standalones are great; the Stormlight Archive is a huge slog through some beautiful writing, but I'm not sure I'm willing to spend so much time in beautiful books that move the plot forward so slowly.
Exordia, by Seth Dickinson, started off incredible, kept going, but the ending felt like both a fizzle as well as a cliff-hanger for the next book. I'm glad I read it, but I wish it had a clear conclusion it wanted to reach.
Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Memory" delivers more of the great philosophical questions & answers about the nature of consciousness and personhood that the previous books did, A+. No idea where he could possibly go from there, but if he does, I'm going along for the journey. (Honorable mention: Alien Clay. Dishonorable mention: Service Model.)
Eric Flint's "Fenrir" was a fun BDO near-future space adventure. (As was John Sanford's Saturn Run, but that wasn't a 2025 book I read.)
- I don't know why Children of Ruin came to my mind instead of Children of Time, but I agreed that the first book is more focused in the spiders. I was told that there is already a third book that end that serie, Children of Memory, gotta read this one! ...
