Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “CHILDREN OF RUIN”

Book review by Dennis D. McDonald

A human, a spider, and an octopus walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and asks, “Want to go on an adventure?”

This novel is an amazing feat of world building that in someways rivals Tolkien’s accomplishments with Middle Earth. It’s not world building made from clashes of great armies and civilizations over millennia but instead focuses on the clashes of cultures, personalities, and races (human and nonhuman).

There are also dashes of sexual politics (but not in the way you might imagine) as well as flourishes of wry humor and clever wordplay.

Into the mix of humans, intelligent spiders, and artificial intelligence, introduced in the author’s Children of Time we now have enhanced spacefaring octopuses and an almost godlike entity that is evolving, parasitic, and most of all, adventurous.

Somehow the author interweaves all these characters and races and infuses each character (human and nonhuman) with personality. In the process he constantly emphasizes the role that complicated and difficult inter-species communication plays in the evolving plot.

I was certainly glad to see the spiders return from the first book. They are a fascinating race. The author paints them with unique personalities and quirks while never letting us forget they are after all spiders. Still, I did find myself forgetting at times whether a character I was reading about was a human, a spider, or even an octopus the characters personalities are so deftly described.

Review copyright (c) 2021 by Dennis D. McDonald