Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book felt like reading a dream, where you as the reader are thrust between vignettes and canons without any explanation, all while the book proceeds as if nothing is wrong. I often found myself looking back on previous chapters or checking page numbers just in case my copy of the book had a printing error; anything to explain why the characters were having no reaction to life-altering events referenced just a few pages before. By the end of the book, all of that confusion is revealed to be incredibly deliberate by the author, but that doesn't change how hard the book is to read until you get to that point. Children of Memory is roughly 500 pages long, and I would wager that 300 of those pages are spent barely grasping what's going on.
With that out of the way, Children of Memory continues the strengths of its two predecessors by conducting some really fascinating discussions about different forms of consciousness. Alongside that, the new technologies and post-scarcity Human society are really exciting to read about. I feel like Tchaikovsky excels at exploring philosophy and speculative biology in as much detail as he possibly can, all while still leaving the reader with just enough open to feel like they're bringing the lines together themselves. He is without a doubt one of my favorite authors because his stories are so rewarding to read. As frustrating as I found CoM to read at times, those little snippets of interesting concepts or character interactions kept me engaged the whole way through.
This is a great book that I can easily recommend to enjoyers of the "Children of" series. Especially if you want a deep dive into the inner workings of the entity introduced at the end of Children of Ruin, this is a must read. Miranda is a fantastic character, and I was almost brought to tears from her journey of self-acceptance by the end of the book. I think that compared to the previous two books, CoM is just the slightest bit weaker because its storytelling building up to the reveal at the end was difficult to grasp for a lot of the book's runtime. After finishing the book, I can appreciate how I as the reader was sent on the same mind-bending adventure that the main characters were, and that intentional blinding was meant to put me in the shoes of the characters. I think that I could get a lot from rereading this book with the knowledge I have now guiding me. But this is a long book, and I spent a lot of it not knowing what was going on and nervous that my copy of the book was misprinted. Because of that, I feel like I have to give CoM a more lukewarm score than I did the previous two entries in this series, which were much more direct in their storytelling. I can't wait to see where the series goes from here, though, if there will be another book.
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