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Roman’s gone AWOL so long that he is now a serious whiskey-loving deserter of Citadel, yearning for Diana Drea.
Now that she has joined Citadel, he’s taken over chasing down her little sister, Rhianna, when she runs off, because now she runs past Ianna’s atmosphere and into territory she knows nothing about.
Roman hopes to get into Diana’s good graces after hurting her when he left without telling her anything. He has some serious problems to overcome before he can compete with Rhett for her again. It may take years, if not life, which leaves Rhett, his exact double, to claim her as all his, possibly for life.
His problems are so serious, even seventeen-year-old Rhianna, who tells her older sister almost everything, knows. Can he help himself and Rhianna too after she gets herself into some serious traumatic trouble? Can Diana’s mind overrule her broken heart to finally choose between two exactly identical men once and for all or will fate decide for her forever?
by Brian Scott Pauls
Children of Memory is the weakest entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s original Children of Time trilogy.1 Tor published this third volume in the U.K. in 2022 and Orbit did so in the United States the next year.2 The trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023—a win Tchaikovsky has declined to claim because of irregularities in the administration of Hugo nominations that year.3
The Colony
The book’s premise resembles certain elements found in Children of Time.4 The ark ship Enkidu, under Captain Heorest Holt, carries its sleeping cargo to a terraformed world.5 In the first book, the terraforming project went wrong, producing a civilization of spiders. Here it goes wrong, producing a world that can support human life, but just barely. The planet Imir is marginal from the start, with soil chemistry not quite lethal to Earth life, but “wrong enough to have all sorts of long-term impacts.”6 The ocean provides no recourse: “There was also a too-big moon, which had its own moon, making the tides a wild riot. This meant settling anywhere near the sea would be a fatal mistake; so much for maritime aquaculture.”7
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Generations later, Holt’s descendants live in the farming town of Landfall, where equipment is failing and harvests are getting worse.8 A militia keeps order on behalf of “the older Landfall families,” resulting in a community ruled by status and force: “The punching around here only goes one way, and that’s down.”9
The fragile ecology the terraformers created is the root of the colony’s decline: “A collapse of the resource web leads to a collapse of infrastructure which leads to the collapse of everything else.”10 Here, “everything else” includes civil society. Landfall’s ruling class needs enemies to maintain order, and when it can’t find real enemies, it invents them. Tchaikovsky captures this stark reality with phrases such as “You defined us by not being them”11 and “…find someone more them than you are, and put the boot in.”12
So far, so good. But Landfall is a dull world filled with dull characters, and while Tchaikovsky is skillful enough to convey that dullness convincingly, he’s unsuccessful in writing an interesting story about an uninteresting place.
Holt is a decent man worn to a nub, the parts of him “that wanted to scream and beat at the walls … locked away for now.”13 Liff, the main character for much of the story,14 is a clever girl15 who doesn’t receive enough opportunities to make her cleverness count. The townsfolk are a mob in waiting, and little else. The novel forces readers to spend far too much time in their company, waiting for an unsatisfying payoff.
It’s not helpful that Tchaikovsky resorts to a plot device that may still make headlines, but which creators have overused in the past quarter-century. Long-time science fiction readers are likely to see it coming, and a twist that the reader anticipates is no longer a twist.
The Corvids
Just as the strongest elements of Tchaikovsky’s excellent Children of Ruin were the octopuses and the Nodan organism,16 here they’re the Corvids and the Interlocutor.
The Corvids are Gethli and Gothi, a pair of crow-like birds traveling with the strangers,17 and they are the most humorous and most unsettling characters in the book. Each Corvid on its own is a clever animal. Together they’re…more. Their species works in bonded pairs, one partner storing and recalling information while the other analyzes and invents.18 Tchaikovsky depicts this partnership as a single mind emerging from the interaction of two entities. The birds trade “a quickfire rattle of ratchety consonants that serve as thoughts from one side of their shared brain to the other”19—as Tchaikovsky puts it, “In the space between each pair, a mind.”20
As with the spiders and octopuses, he knows what he’s talking about. Real corvids have become a major subject of research on animal intelligence, and researchers have documented tool manufacture, caching strategies that take account of which other birds were watching, and apparent planning for the future—abilities that developed independently of the great apes’ and amount to a case of convergent evolution.21 Like many real corvids, those in Children of Memory pair for life. Tchaikovsky turns the pair bond into the species’ seat of cognition.22
What makes the Corvids memorable, though, is how they characterize their own cognition. They insist, cheerfully and at length, that they are not conscious. “We’re a mistake, basically,” one of them explains; “…what we really are is a problem-solving engine.”23 Regarding those who credit them with inner lives, they remark: “They are very keen to convince themselves that we’re aware, but the evidence suggests otherwise.” They also share a disturbing observation: “Don’t tell the Humans, but it’s just the same for them.”24
This is John Searle’s Chinese Room—a system producing outward signs of understanding, while its structure would seem to make this doubtful.25 This doesn’t bother the Corvids. They find the whole question beside the point: “Neither of us need to understand anything. The understanding sits between us.”26 Real neuroscience may indicate otherwise. In 2020, researchers at the University of Tübingen recorded neurons in crows, the activity of which tracked whether a bird reported seeing a faint stimulus—a candidate neural signature of sensory consciousness in a bird.27 This might impress readers, but perhaps not the Corvids.
The Interlocutor
The second strength is Miranda, part of a scout ship crew sent to investigate a signal from Imir. She’s the expedition’s Interlocutor—a Nodan organism, the memory-absorbing parasite from Children of Ruin, now inhabiting a laboratory-grown human body.28
Miranda’s scenes in Landfall carry empathy the colonists lack for one another.29 In a fascinating reversal, the inhuman “monster” from the second novel has become the most humane character in the third.
Sentience
While Tchaikovsky’s major theme in Children of Ruin was intelligence, here it’s sentience, but in a loose sense. As often occurs in science fiction, he conflates sentience (the ability to feel sensations such as pleasure and pain), sapience (the ability to solve complex intellectual problems), and consciousness (subjective experience—the sense of being oneself).30 The second novel asked whether minds with different evolutionary histories could understand one another. Children of Memory asks how anyone—spider, octopus, crow, human, or organism—can know that there is someone home at all.
Tchaikovsky presents this mystery through the Corvids’ bargain-basement philosophy of mind. It’s clear and entertaining, better than most textbook accounts. Gethli tells Gothi that “…we can’t ever really know if we understand or not. It feels as though we do, up until the point that we’re challenged…”31
While the Corvids explain sentience (or its lack), Miranda and her other crewmates explore it. They assume that the signal they came to investigate on Imir is a sign of sentient activity, but later find reason to doubt such an assumption.32
Miranda’s very nature provides an intriguing perspective. A creature that exists as a copy of another creature and remembers being many things cannot take its own continuity for granted. What frightens Miranda is not that she feels diminished, but that she feels entirely herself. This scares her “[b]ecause it means her sense of self is fallible.”33
Using stricter definitions of “sentience,” “sapience,” and “consciousness,” the Corvids as individuals are sentient. In bonded pairs, they’re sapient, but they may not be conscious at all. The Nodan organism is both conscious and sapient, but may not be sentient outside of a host. And humans, as the creators of the terms used to describe our own mental experience, are all three.
The plot device discussed earlier is essential to the climax of the book. Tchaikovsky uses it to examine, on a larger canvas, the same doubts the Corvids have expressed about their own “sentience” (really, consciousness). But to reach this payoff, such as it is, the reader spends most of the novel in a tedious place populated by many tedious people.
Verdict
Children of Memory is a serious novel with fascinating questions about sentience. It deserves a better story and, with a few notable exceptions, better characters.
Recommended for: Readers who finished Children of Ruin wanting more; anyone interested in the philosophy of mind, or in the intelligence of crows.
Not recommended for: Anyone who wants the plot to move as fast as the ideas.
Thoughts about Children of Memory? Please comment below!
Artificial intelligence tools performed multiple tasks in the creation and publication of this article.
This month, I’m sharing my thoughts about B. L. Blanchard’s Sidewise Award-winning novel The Peacekeeper on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.
Here’s my latest comment in the discussion thread:
”I love how the indigenous society portrayed in the book takes care of all its people:
’There were few needy in Baatwitigon. They lived by the principle of mino-bimaadiziwin—the good life: be good to one another, be good to nature, and live healthy in both mind and spirit. They took care of each other and, in doing so, took care of themselves.’”
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Hachette Book Group, “Children of Strife,” accessed October 24, 2026, https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adrian-tchaikovsky/children-of-strife/9780316598965/, describing it as “the fourth volume” of the series, on sale March 17, 2026.
John Clute, “Tchaikovsky, Adrian,” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute, David Langford, and Graham Sleight, updated September 21, 2026, https://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/tchaikovsky_adrian, listing Children of Memory (London: Tor Macmillan, 2022); Hachette Book Group, “Children of Memory,” accessed October 23, 2026, https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adrian-tchaikovsky/children-of-memory/9780316466400/, giving the Orbit US on-sale date of January 31, 2023.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, “Hugo 2023 Statement,” accessed October 23, 2026, https://adriantchaikovsky.com/hugo-2023-statement.html; Mike Glyer, “Adrian Tchaikovsky Will No Longer Cite His 2023 Hugo,” File 770 (blog), February 21, 2024, https://file770.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-will-no-longer-cite-his-2023-hugo/; Clute, “Tchaikovsky, Adrian.”
Clute, “Tchaikovsky, Adrian,” listing Children of Time (London: Tor Macmillan, 2015), winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Hachette Book Group, “Children of Memory”; Alan K. Dell, “Book Review: Children of Memory,” accessed October 23, 2026, https://www.alankdell.co.uk/blog/book-review-children-of-memory, describing “a human colony that arrived on the sleeper ship Enkidu, cousin to the Gilgamesh from the first book.”
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory (New York: Orbit, 2023), 23.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 24.
Pan Macmillan, “Children of Memory,” paperback (London: Pan, 2023), accessed October 24, 2026, https://www.panmacmillan.co.za/authors/adrian-tchaikovsky/children-of-memory/9781529087192, publisher’s description: “As harvests worsen and equipment fails, strangers appear in a town where everyone knows their neighbour”; Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 130–31.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 130–31.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 134.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 61.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 139.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 19.
Dell, “Book Review: Children of Memory,” describing Liff as “a child of the colony” and the main viewpoint character on Imir.
“Children of Memory (novel),” Wikipedia, accessed October 24, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Memory_(novel), describing Liff as “a precocious child descended from Captain Holt.”
Clute, “Tchaikovsky, Adrian,” listing Children of Ruin (London: Tor Macmillan, 2019), winner of the BSFA Award for best novel.
Dell, “Book Review: Children of Memory,” noting that the explorers “picked up a delegation of Corvids” (Dell spells one name “Gothli”); for the spellings used here, see Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 173, 445.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 387, where the Corvids speak of “pairs of memorizer and thinker.”
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 249.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 387.
Nathan J. Emery and Nicola S. Clayton, “The Mentality of Crows: Convergent Evolution of Intelligence in Corvids and Apes,” Science 306, no. 5703 (2004): 1903–7, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1098410.
Nathan J. Emery, Amanda M. Seed, Auguste M. P. von Bayern, and Nicola S. Clayton, “Cognitive Adaptations of Social Bonding in Birds,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362, no. 1480 (2007): 489–505, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2006.1991, noting that species “which form lifelong pair bonds, including many corvids and parrots, tend to have the largest relative sized brains”; on the Corvids’ bonded pairs, see Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 387.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 384.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 388.
John R. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (1980): 417–24, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00005756.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 383.
Andreas Nieder, Lysann Wagener, and Paul Rinnert, “A Neural Correlate of Sensory Consciousness in a Corvid Bird,” Science 369, no. 6511 (2020): 1626–29, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb1447; University of Tübingen, “Tübingen Researchers Show Conscious Processes in Birds’ Brains for the First Time,” press release, September 24, 2020, https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/university/news-and-publications/press-releases/press-releases/article/tuebingen-researchers-show-conscious-processes-in-birds-brains-for-the-first-time/.
Dell, “Book Review: Children of Memory,” describing Miranda as “a Nodan parasite who has been given a (lab-grown) human body” who “serves as Interlocutor aboard the ship,” and as “a Nodan parasite housing the memories of all the people her collective has been”; Dell also describes “a scout ship sent to investigate a signal around one of the old terraformers’ worlds.”
See, for example, Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 306.
“sentience, n.,” Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, accessed October 24, 2026, https://sfdictionary.com/view/1435/sentience, giving the science-fictional sense as “the condition of being sentient; intelligence,” whereas the OED sense “has the sense of having feeling or sensation, but not intelligence”; on sentience as phenomenal consciousness, distinct from self-consciousness, see Colin Allen, “Animal Consciousness,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2006 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2006/entries/consciousness-animal/.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 173.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 343, 445–46.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory, 433.
