Review-ish: Children of Memory (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
I’m looking forward to what kind of wild animal remix we’re getting this time. I’m honestly not sure Adrian Tchaikovsky can top our existing menagerie of spider, octopi, and slime (and Human).
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p. 3
“An uplifted species capable of recognizing the Portiids as fellow sentients, with whom they can share their world.”
We’ve come full circle. Now the humans (sorry, I mean Humans) are receiving the uplifting.
Also, I appreciate the quick refresher.
p. 18
It’s a good thing this ark ship ran into a whole lot of nothing throughout the rest of space, because their first ‘something’ sure did not do nothing.
But hey, they’re still doing better than Nod!
p. 21
Poor Esi, cramming all that vocab for nothing. Maybe the lichen will appreciate it.
p. 26
I love how the Classicists (aka the Party Bards) are just as important as Science and Engineering. Always looking for new and forbidden Lore in the cosmos.
p. 30
“Should have called the place Pandora.” — Esi
Cue Borderlands intro theme.
p. 37
It’s strange to me that Holt’s backstory has already become a bit of a myth despite the fact that he’s still alive.
I’m a bit disappointed that we skipped the building-a-civilization phase because that’s my favorite part.
Aren’t these people supposed to be modern-ish? I know we have our Rituals, but some of these are a bit silly. How long was the time skip? Is Holt alive because it’s only been a few decades or because the pods still work?
p. 47
Gethli and Gothi even sound like fairytale names.
“Can we eat her, Gothi?”
Yup. Witch.
p. 48
Ah. Yes. The pre-book did mention something about crows.
p. 52
Can someone explain to me Adrian Tchaikovsky’s obsession with the name ‘Fabian’? I’m not complaining; I’ve just never met so many Fabians in my life.
p. 57
“Because spiders eat the beetles that need eating, and that’s why you should never, ever, under any circumstances, kill a spider.” — Miranda
Good. She’s already conditioning them appropriately for their inevitable future in intergalactic relations.
p. 61
Landfall took ‘us vs. them’ and made it mythical. How dare them.
Hold on. Is this a Spider-aligned Fabian? So Miranda was prepping them for their spider-friendly future!
p. 66
But why are Fabian and Portia human? Or are they not? Not entirely? Explain.
p. 72
“Now we’re getting a severe dressing down and I don’t know why you didn’t warn me. She’s not interested in the beetles at all.” — Gothi
I’m so sorry that she is not interested in your beetles. That’s so rude of her.
p. 73
I’m increasingly suspicious that the Witch is Avrana Kern. But that still doesn’t answer whether Miranda and company are her crew or an entirely separate crew.
p. 81
“Mistakes, on a very grand level and with terrible consequences, were made.”
Well I suppose that’s one way to explain eating an entire planet.
Miranda is slime.
p. 85
Are they all slime?
p. 91
“The inhabitants of Rourke were apparently more purist than she was.”
More purist than Avrana Kern? How?
p. 92
Birds: “Please, be welcome :)”
Birds, moments later: * grinning, saws and cutting torches out *
p. 93
“It’s not clear that they think at all.” — Kern, after the Corvids perfectly reassemble Portiid technology from a schematic
p. 96
Don’t you dare tell me that the Corvids are the last living meme-lords.
p. 103
I’m honestly surprised that Kern is fine with the Corvids dismantling her ship. She’s come so far as a person.
Miranda: “What if they dismantle our sleep pods while we’re in them?”
Kern: “They already dismantled one, so they probably won’t do it again.”
p. 104
“And Kern was always Kern’s harshest critic.”
Life is rough when there are thousands of you.
p. 105
I like that the Corvids are just a doubled-down “let me repurpose your everything.” Kind of like the slime.
p. 107
Kern: “It is unlikely that the birds are thinking for themselves.”
The birds in question: * dismantle and remantle their two sleep pods into one so that they can go into stasis together, tossing in some improvements based on their own biology while they’re at it *
Kern: “…I’m still not convinced.”
p. 118
“That some child had woken screaming about a spider the size of your head.”
Okay that one’s actually valid.
p. 122
The Witch turning animals into people is the riddle I’m still trying to solve, too.
p. 131
“The punching around here only goes one way, and that’s down.”
Where are my fun space octopi? If I wanted to hear about boring, awful people doing boring, awful people things, I’d read the news. TT_TT
p. 133
“It’s as if the people of Landfall hadn’t been living their lives in the understanding that, later on, amateur anthropologists from another culture entirely would want to study them.”
How irredeemably inconsiderate of them.
p. 136
Sigh. I guess everyone gets to pilot a body these days.
p. 137
Look, if someone swooped in and told me I could be living a life of comparative luxury, I’d take that offer in a heartbeat. No unnecessary suffering for me, thanks. I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid.
p. 140
Ohhh, the children are his arms. I really, really need an explanation for where they got these bodies and how they work.
p. 142
How about we take Liff and evacuate? And any other sensible person still left.
p. 152
What happened to these poor birds that has Gothi compelled to count rice?
p. 166
I was really hoping that Molder would be one of the ones who got shot.
p. 170
So…
How did they stuff themselves into human shapes? What technology is this? How are the children arms so far away and yet so reconnectable? I am so ready for an explanation, Kern. Please.
p. 178
“Sometimes the friends you met along the road were within you all along.”
This is how I will be explaining my imaginary friends from now on.
p. 179
“Understandings were still a work in progress, outside of the Portiids themselves. So far nobody had managed to encode Octopus sensoria for Humans or Portiids — or not for any purpose other than to give a spectacular psychedelic trip.”
Getting high on octopi.
p. 182
“[Renee Pepper] wanted to go into space and create life, because somehow engineering webs of Earth life to live on distant exoplanets seemed easier than meeting either a nice guy or a nice girl and settling down with either or both.”
She might be on to something.
I bet she and Kern would get along.
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p. 187
“You didn’t just empty out a bucket of species and see which ones didn’t keel over and die. Terraforming was a precise science.”
“Twenty-five years in, she was throwing every living thing at the wall to see what stuck.”
She has impressive resolve. ‘Throw everything at the wall to see what sticks’ is practically my motto. Which is I suppose why I have not yet been invited to terraform any planets.
“The ants were fine, the fuckers. She hated the fucking ants with a passion, even though just about every other lame-duck crippled thing was eating them.”
She and Kern would not get along.
p. 188
“The corvids had taken a serious look at everything that was out there, not liked it, and come right back.”
This is what you get for releasing intelligent wildlife.
p. 193
“So yes, the raccoons weren’t having a good time of it over on Rourke, but they lasted long enough to breed more raccoons who would continue not to enjoy themselves very much. Which was evolution’s endgame after all.”
Sounds like Renee needs therapy.
p. 196
Look on the bright side, Renee. You’ve never had to face Corvid-level pressure in finding the correct mate. :)
p. 198
It’s kind of cute that they play Renee Dress-up when she’s gone. Even if that doesn’t count as thinking, it has to count as feeling.
p. 207
The Corvids rebuilt their pods to allow the two of them to go into stasis together, so I’d say that implies actual thought. They absolutely have their own goals and the cleverness to achieve them. Maybe they don’t draft their own sentences, but they do quote situationally appropriate dialogue.
p. 211
“…it wasn’t as if she needed to know about wars and presidents and disasters and Earth.”
Given that Liff is human and that history is about to repeat itself, I’d say that she probably needs to know at least a little bit about wars and presidents and disasters and Earth.
p. 227
I’m so lost as to how this timeline is lining up. Liff shouldn’t be here back at the almost beginning. Unless we’re doing a Portia/Fabian thing again, and she’s just one of many Liffs.
p. 251
Are we in virtual reality? Is that the secret?
p. 261
“Paul’s self-appointed role in most discussions was to disagree.”
You need one on every ship.
p. 277
This poor slime is so good at Human that it succeeded at panic attack.
p. 293
Everyone is somehow fine after being hung, so there are definitely shenanigans afoot.
p. 294
See, Liff remembers the hanging, too!
p. 304
I would say that maybe Liff is the one making things up, but Miranda was also there at the hanging, narrated the whole thing, and then came back fine. And while I can accept that maybe they’re printing new bodies for themselves, I don’t know how they got them back into the village without being caught, so…
p. 307
Is Liff the aliens?
p. 324
Is Kern a vampire now? Is that why she can’t come inside?
I think they should let her in if only so that I can finally get some answers.
And as we all know, letting a fairytale Witch into your home has never not been an excellent idea.
p. 335
Kern: “I am God!”
Liff: “Oh thank God, finally words I understand.”
p. 346
“Fabian was frankly fed up with mysteries of the cosmos right then.”
Fabian: “That planet took my drone!”
And then he spent the rest of the trip sulking in the corner.
p. 350
Miranda: “We shall not be doing ‘business’ here.”
The business in question: Eating people
“[Kern] wouldn’t want to go and see how well the small-h humans had done, but conceivably she might want to go and see how badly.”
Stop making Kern relatable! Now I feel bad!
p. 352
“You’re like a debutante about to go to your first party.” — Kern, to Miranda
And that’s so cute of her. I love my precious slime girl.
p. 358
Hold on a minute! I remember a farm! We were just at a farm! There’s definitely a farm! Stop trying to take away my memories, too, book!
p. 361
Fabian: “We need more milk.”
Miranda: “You people don’t even lactate!”
p. 377
I’m glad Liff agrees that time is broken. That makes me feel saner.
p. 399
“I may as well point out that, back when I was human, I didn’t actually give a damn about any of the host of useless monkeys.” — Kern
I was literally about to point out that Miranda is still a better person than Kern, but Kern beat me to it. Winning. As always.
p. 402
Wait, so we were in virtual reality? I was right??? Fascinating.
p. 429
“Because the major lifestyle limit when you’re a parasite is that if you end up devouring your host your prospects look bleak.”
Sounds like further mistakes were made.
p. 430
“Her friends in orbit could spare the time to disentangle her from Imir, because she was more important to them than time.”
That’s true best friend material right there.
p. 431
Book, To Miranda: “Your identities have been split (which is normal for you), but they have also been split (which is not normal for you), so we must carefully recombine you in normal and not-normal ways.”
It’s taken 430/480 pages, but at last it is all coming together. As is Miranda.
“For example, it was now theoretically possible for the Nodan entity in aggregate to start hosting instances of Avrana Kern through a similar process.”
They’re installing Kern on everything. She’s the new Doom.
It is the fate of every sufficiently advanced alien race to inevitably end up running at least one instance of Avrana Kern.
(But actually though, is there a fourth book? I am fearful.)
p. 433
“Sometimes the friends we meet along the way were inside us all along…”
I love that this book keeps validating my totally-not-imaginary friends. I feel so normal and well adjusted.
The moral of the story is that I identify most closely with slime.
“Now, after an unknown entity had copied her, and then her friends had, through considerable study and effort, done it again, she still feels just like herself. And that’s markedly more frightening than if she had felt herself diminished or coarsened by the transcription process. Because it means her sense of self is fallible.”
It is too middle-of-the-night for this flavor of existential dread.
p. 444
Kern, to the Corvids: “Are you sentient? I don’t think you’re sentient.”
Corvids: “Well, we have thought long and hard about it and come to the conclusion that you are not sentient, either.”
Corvids: “…”
Corvids: “So there!”
p. 445
“We know we don’t think, so why should anything else?”
The Corvids accidentally re-introduce anti-intellectualism.
p. 447
Kern: “Well I have ruled you sentient!”
Kern: “…”
Kern: “So there!”
p. 448
Kern: “Neither of us have intellectual property rights to the body of the woman we are wearing.”
Miranda: “The woman in me who owns the intellectual property rights objects. However, I, a slime, cannot.”
Now that 100% of my braincells are no longer dedicated to unraveling The Mystery I can joke about my favorites again.
p. 449
“I’m still being cagey with myself. Which I hate. I should trust me. But apparently, spending centuries in a simulation means I’m just not me enough for me.” — Kern
Simulation or not, I doubt any Kern will ever be Kern enough for Kern.
p. 450
“You may want to secure yourself. We’re going to have some physics now.” — Kern
When the physics have you in their sights, nothing is secure and nowhere is safe.
I hope they gave all the simulation people new bodies and are busy introducing them to the future. Technically their culture is as preserved as it can possibly be, so we shouldn’t need to worry about that anymore.
p. 456
No colony, even? How could you do this to me???
p. 463
Miranda: “If I’m not real, and if Kern’s not real, then Liff must be real.”
Indisputable logic.
p. 468
Miranda: “Clearly the most humane solution is to recreate the Last Child and shoulder her with the fate of her entire nonexistent civilization.”
Everyone else: * nodding along *
Apparently I have been sleeping on science fiction as a genre. This is top-tier drama.
p. 469
Of all the wild shit that has happened, Miranda meeting OG-Miranda and being told that she is the better Miranda was not on my bingo card.
p. 480
Wait no go back I want to meet the simulator!
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I generally would not approve of an “and it was all a dream” ending, but we met the simulator and have the technology to make the dream real, so I think the author actually gets a pass on this one. And he gets bonus points for giving me a book almost entirely about a slime girl while avoiding every single slime girl trope. So there’s that.
And now that I have confirmed that there is, in fact, another book, I can dream about meeting the simulator for real. We do meet the simulator for real, right?
