First Impressions Review: Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I’m always excited to find science fiction that explores the POV of a non-human consciousness in a way that feels alien. Adrian Tchaikovsky is clearly the current reigning champion of this. In this book he presents us with five different intelligent entities – the humans and spiders we met in the first book, plus octopuses, a computer-based consciousness, and a parasitic alien – which all have distinct species-level characteristics to the way they think that make sense given their lifestyles and evolutionary history1. At the same time, individuals within the first three species also have distinct personalities. The focus of this book is very much on the challenges of communicating with someone fundamentally different from you, but also gets to dive a bit into the psychology of “purpose”.
1. For instance, both the spiders and the octopuses are better than humans at thinking in 3 dimensions but, while the spiders are meticulous planners, the octopuses have more of an…artistic temperament.
We begin the story with Disra Senkovi, a probably-autistic scientist2 who I fell in love with immediately. He is part of one of the many terraforming missions that have been sent out into the galaxy. But there is a problem: As Commander Baltiel is able to theatrically announce (with Senkovi’s help on the data), the planet they are supposed to terraform is already home to multicellular alien life of considerable size and complexity. Feeling it would be a crime to destroy it, they split the mission. Baltiel and a few others stay to study the alien life, while Senkovi and the rest of the crew go to the ice-covered planet next door to terraform that. Of course, it might be better termed “aqua-forming” since the resulting world will end up mostly ocean. An excellent place for Senkovi to try out his new idea:
“What the hell is that?” Baltiel demanded. “Yusuf, meet Paul. Say hi, Paul.” Understandably, Paul said nothing… “Disra, is this a pet? Have you been using mission resources to breed domestic…octopodes?” Another brief twitch, and Senkovi knew his superior had been looking up the plural and settled on the most awkward-sounding one.
Senkovi argues that by doing a bit of minor “uplift” with a virus (the same one that accelerated the cognitive evolution of the spiders in the last book) he can make some great underwater assistants. Of course, once the octopuses are smart enough to use the ship computer they start idly hacking it, just out of pure curiosity. Senkovi has to shut down the ship…and that ends up saving him, four other members of the crew including Baltiel, and the octopuses, because it means the ship isn’t disabled by the attack virus that took out every other vessel that was receiving messages from earth when the war started. But now, of course, they are stuck – the last humans in the galaxy, for all they know. And we get a hint that something in the existing alien biosphere is conscious, thinks of itself as both singular and plural, and is aware of the new things studying its world.
2. On hacking his own personality assessment, he discovers: “There were two main poles, for a multi-decade mission like this…One related to how well a crewmember could cope working in isolation…He aced that one. The other related working in close confinement alongside other human beings you simply could not escape from, and he was dismayed to see how close he had come to rejection…Senkovi felt himself an affable, outgoing man. From the age of nine he had been working on constructing pseudointelligences to have conversations with…He’d owned nineteen aquariums…And there was, in his humble opinion, not a human being alive who enjoyed jokes more than he did; it was just that nobody else found his funny.”
We then jump several millennia forward in time to the Voyager, a spaceship of flexible size and shape built on web technology. It is flown primarily by an offshoot of Avrana Kern, who once was human, but is now basically a computer program with a short temper. The crewmembers we follow most closely are two Human-Portiid pairs of scientists, both of whom are working on ways to improve communication between their species. With Portia, Helena Holsten Lain is testing gloves that will translate the vibration-based communication of the spiders into human words. Meshner Osten Oslam and Fabian, with their robot spider assistant Artifabian, have been developing something more direct: a brain implant to allow Fabian to “beam” images and feelings directly into the human’s brain. Unfortunately, this tends to involve Meshner having seizures or falling over as he loses track of how many legs he has!
A skiff, the Lightfoot, containing our main characters plus two more spider ladies, makes contact with the local civilization, but – despite the fact that human tech clearly underlies both societies – they struggle to make sense of what they are seeing. The bubble-shaped ships accelerate and decelerate much more slowly than they should if filled with air, and their “skins” flash with confusing patterns of colors. Helena tries to respond with colors suggesting peace, and then sends a picture of a human…at which point all hell breaks loose as one faction of cephalopods tries to attack them and others try to defend!
The previous book explored the struggle of male Portiids for equality…or at least the right to not be eaten! By the time of the Voyager, males are theoretically equal; As in our world but in reverse, a good deal of sexism remains both structurally and in the form of conscious and unconscious bias. It is partly this that makes Fabian so keen to make his and Meshner’s project successful – there’s nothing like condescension to breed an “I’ll show you!” attitude. There’s a few more nods to human diversity in this book too. Besides Senkovi’s autism, most of the surviving terraformers are some flavor of LGBT+ - Lortisse, Lante, and Rani form a M/F/F polycule, and Baltiel thinks Senkovi is very attractive but deeply irritating…which is a moot point, since Senkovi is asexual. This isn’t explored too deeply, though. What is explored is the existential crisis that humans would likely feel if they thought they were the last of their kind. What is the point of doing anything if no one will ever know about it? Senkovi is the luckiest, perhaps, since he already has his octopus friends/protégées to focus on – and they do, indeed, remember him something like a friendly angel several millennia later.
I will stop describing things now, to avoid giving specific spoilers past the first third of the book. But I will say this… Sometimes people talk about how pessimistic science fiction has gotten, compared to the sunnier visions of humanity’s future seen in, say, the 1950s. Based on this series, at least, Tchaikovsky seems to take an interesting middle path. He doesn’t pretend that the survival of humanity or our peaceful interactions with other sentient species is likely to be easy – humans nearly go extinct several times in these books through our own aggressiveness and short-sightedness – but things do work out more-or-less OK in the end. And I kind of like that balance!
Overall recommendation: If you like books that mix edge-of-your-seat tension with musing on the meaning of life and philosophy of mind, or books that explore the impact of biology on culture, then this series is for you!
