Children of Ruin

This doesn’t quite live up to the mind-blowing opener that was Children of Time, but I still had an absolute blast. The new concepts are if anything even more interesting than in Time, in particular the idea of a sentient species with a decentralised nervous system. The octopi’s will and cognition are completely separate from their problem solving abilities; I can’t think of another science fiction work with minds that feel so alien, and Tchaikovsky achieves it with a neurology that actually exists on Earth. The prose, as in the first one, is sophisticated without being flowery. There’s enough going on at the sentence level to be interesting, and some occasional turns of phrase are beautiful or just cleverly witty. My only knock is the arc of the plot (the final act in particular) follows much the same trajectory as the first book, which diminishes the impact of the ending a little. But Ruin gave me a second helping of what I loved about Time, and “pick weird Earth animals and give them society and language” is still a recipe for the most interesting aliens in sci-fi.