Children of Memory by Adrian Tchiakovsky

First published in Great Britain in 2022; published by Orbit on January 31, 2023

Children of Memory is the third book in a trilogy. While the books are connected by a shared history and a few characters, they tell independent stories. It isn’t necessary to read the first two novels to enjoy the third.

After a very long journey from Earth, a ship full of sleeping humans arrive at Imir. The ship is on its last legs. Some of the pods in which humans sleep are ruined, but most passengers are still alive. Unfortunately, the terraforming seeds that were planted on Imir long ago have only barely taken root. The planet has no predators because it has no life at all, apart from the primitive algae and such that the terraformers seeded. Imir might sustain a small settlement that works hard to grow the right crops and breed the right animals, but it won’t sustain the thousands on the ship.

All but a handful of settlers are left in orbit in the hope that they can one day be brought to the surface. That hope dims when the landers that operate between the surface and the orbiting ship break down. The survivors who make it to the planet must live with the guilt of leaving so many behind.

That’s a great concept for a story, but it’s only one part of Children of Memory. Before they travel to the surface, the colonists detect a radio signal. They pinpoint its origin and decide to build their settlement nearby, but they are too busy with the struggle for survival to investigate it. When they finally establish a foothold, the captain goes into the hills to find the signal’s source. What happens to him? Three hundred years later, nobody is quite sure.

In an earlier novel, a terraforming project gone wrong caused spiders with uplifted intelligence to evolve on another planet. The uploaded mind of the woman behind the terraforming (Avrana Kern) and one of the spiders, as well as a pair of birds and additional aliens that appeared in the second novel, make their way to Imir on a grand tour of planets that were seeded with life. What they find on Imir is puzzling.

A woman named Miranda, who thinks of herself as human but is something more than that, is dispatched to investigate. She plays the role of a teacher and befriends a young girl named Liff, who somehow remembers witnessing the entire history of the planet, including events that occurred long before she was born.

Miranda realizes that the colony is falling apart. Crops are failing, animals are not reproducing, machinery has broken down. She wants desperately to help while the colonists, wary of outsiders who have suddenly appeared, don’t trust her. A mythology of “others” has evolved during the colony’s brief existence. In tough times, it is always good to blame your problems on others. Perhaps the others managed to escape from the orbiting ship and set up a competing civilization. Perhaps the other are indigenous. Miranda claims to be from an outlying farm but she’s the only obvious evidence that “others” exist. She’s in danger of being lynched because lynching “others” is what humans do. The society’s development of an “us versus them” mindset, even in the absence of a “them,” is a smart take on human nature.

After some time passes, Kern loses track of Miranda. She sends the birds to find her. The birds excel at solving puzzles but are baffled by what they find. Nothing on Imir is what it seems to be. Liff thinks Kern is a witch but the truth is more complicated.

The story jumps around in time. That’s a common literary trick, but here the shifting time frames have a larger purpose. They make sense in the overall context of the story for reasons that won’t be revealed until the novel nears its end. A shift back to the day the colonists first landed on Imir, told in one of the novel’s concluding chapters, provides a satisfying view of events from the reader’s new perspective. Mastery of plot development and storytelling is one of the reasons I keep coming back to Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The story’s most poignant moments surround the choice to leave thousands in suspended animation so that a relative handful have a chance to survive. A later decision to allow couples to reproduce taxes the colony’s limited resources, making it even harder to justify bringing more people down to the planet’s surface. I enjoyed thinking about the moral uncertainties of such difficult choices.

Scenes of pioneering, while abbreviated, give a sense of how difficult it would be to sustain life on a planet that has never supported life. Intermittent debates about the differences between instinct and intelligence, body and mind, sentience and artificial intelligence, simulation and reality, add the philosophical depth at which Tchiakovsky excels. Science fiction is a perfect showcase for such debates, and these are both intriguing and relevant to the plot.

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