Children of Ruin, Vol 2 in Children of Time sequence, reviewed

By @SimonCocking, review of Children of Ruin, Guns of Dawn series by Adrian Tchaikovsky Available from Amazon here.

Children of Ruin

The 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. And it’s been waiting for them.

Children of Ruin is the second book in the series, following on from the Children of Time, written in 2015. It can be a challenge to follow on from a first book, and then on other occasions perhaps you have so many ideas that you want to write another book. The first book, for us, was a success, and worked well in terms of looking at the future of humanity in space from a critical and dispassionate perspective. The flaws of humanity were clearly portrayed and it stumbled into a continued existence. In many ways humanity survived the scenario presented to it in the first book despite rather than because of who we are and how we are as humans.

In this sequel, it then naturally built on that end point, and projected it into a new and interesting future. The collaboration with their new spider allies (masters?) made sense, and the areas exploring the uneasy evolution and growth of interspecies relationships was done well. Also interesting was the exploration of the concept of those humans who preferred not to embrace and integrate with the spider-human future, finding it too far from everything that they had known before. This sections were done well and were interesting.

Then the time jumps and cuts between the future / ancient / legacy humans who inadvertently unleashed the octopus species evolution on another terra formed planet began to lose us a little. This in itself made sense, but as they had evolved from another ancient line of space exploring humans it was necessary to cast a long time span over their story to factor in the challenge of traveling long distances through space, many many light years away. In one way, this is something that Tchaikovsky handles this aspect of space travel well in both books, especially the first by putting the characters back into suspended animation to remind us that while human lifespans remain finite, the distance and time required to travel across space is still vast.

There is a lot to like in this book, and yet at the same time it perhaps followed a similar arc to the first book, roughly that humans (plus friends this time) meet an alien species that they can’t beat. No Captain Kirk out punching the (virtually always [bar the Tribbles]) humanoid bad guys here. This makes sense in terms of making the story probably more realistic and believable, but at the same time you found yourself wondering, ‘the humans are out of their depth here, so is this going to play out like the first book…?’ At the same time, as we have hopefully explained, there was a lot to like in the first volume. There are some interesting aspects in this sequel too. We came away wondering what might be intended for subsequent volumes in what now seems like it is going to be a multi book series. A bit like The Empire Stikes Back you reach the end, only to immediately realise the story doesn’t end here.

He is an interesting writer. Children of Ruin does build on the strong impression made by the first book.While leaving us to wonder what the future holds for this now multi specied array of different intelligences, and how, or where humans might fit into it all.

See the review of first volume here

And our interview with the author here

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