lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2023-03-22 02:48 pm
lightreads) wrote2023-03-22 02:48 pm
Entry tags:
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Memory
4/5. Follows the spiders one and the octopods one. This is sort of the corvids one – there are intelligent corvids who think in paired minds doing different corvid tasks – but also the story of an expedition to a world colonized by a struggling remnant of humanity.
Ah, this is the good shit. I think one reason this series has broken out so well is that it delivers what so many of us want in good science fiction: some chewy thinking about different states of being and embodiment, some deep plunges into the strange waters of alien cognition, and also timey-wimey nonsense.
Specific to that first thing on different states of being, man what a deck he’s playing with here. I’d spoil some of the twists here if I ticked through all of the options, but you have your corvids, your ancient artificial intelligence faintly inhabited by a human ghost echo, some uplifted spiders, an uplifted octopus, a microscopic alien hive mind inhabiting a donated replicant human body, etc. And what he does so well is not only portray these states of being, not only do so interestingly (the corvids claim not to be sentient and are not sure humans are either, and honestly their argument isn’t bad), but he does all that without a thumb on the scale. Most scifi that is about aliens in this way gets squeamish at some point, starts retreating back into the shell of original flavor humanity. Most of the time this kind of scifi says, implicitly if not out loud, that all of this is well and good but we all know what people look like and those people are (able-bodied) humans. Tchaikovsky doesn’t do that, basically ever, and it’s pretty great. And there is a particular development at the end of this book on this subject, adding yet another way of coming into thinking being, that is just perfect.
Content notes: Mob violence, grief.
Someday All This Will be Yours (couldn't easily find a listing for this one, I got it recorded from the National Library Service)
2/5. After finishing Memory I was in the mood for more really good chewy scifi, so I grabbed this time travel novella by him. The description is about the lone survivor of the time war setting up his home at what he thinks of as the end of time, only to discover there is a future after all. That’s broadly true, but really this is about a sociopath being a sociopath and then meeting another sociopath to hook up with. It has a funny, breezy tone, and I can see circumstances where this would have landed right with me, but at this particular moment it absolutely did not scratch the chewy scifi itch I was having. I will say that this novella is doing something funny/unusual with time travel and childbearing/being childfree that I enjoyed conceptually, even though the story itself was not what I wanted.
Content notes: Lots of murder, recollections of futuristic war
4/5. Follows the spiders one and the octopods one. This is sort of the corvids one – there are intelligent corvids who think in paired minds doing different corvid tasks – but also the story of an expedition to a world colonized by a struggling remnant of humanity.
Ah, this is the good shit. I think one reason this series has broken out so well is that it delivers what so many of us want in good science fiction: some chewy thinking about different states of being and embodiment, some deep plunges into the strange waters of alien cognition, and also timey-wimey nonsense.
Specific to that first thing on different states of being, man what a deck he’s playing with here. I’d spoil some of the twists here if I ticked through all of the options, but you have your corvids, your ancient artificial intelligence faintly inhabited by a human ghost echo, some uplifted spiders, an uplifted octopus, a microscopic alien hive mind inhabiting a donated replicant human body, etc. And what he does so well is not only portray these states of being, not only do so interestingly (the corvids claim not to be sentient and are not sure humans are either, and honestly their argument isn’t bad), but he does all that without a thumb on the scale. Most scifi that is about aliens in this way gets squeamish at some point, starts retreating back into the shell of original flavor humanity. Most of the time this kind of scifi says, implicitly if not out loud, that all of this is well and good but we all know what people look like and those people are (able-bodied) humans. Tchaikovsky doesn’t do that, basically ever, and it’s pretty great. And there is a particular development at the end of this book on this subject, adding yet another way of coming into thinking being, that is just perfect.
Content notes: Mob violence, grief.
Someday All This Will be Yours (couldn't easily find a listing for this one, I got it recorded from the National Library Service)
2/5. After finishing Memory I was in the mood for more really good chewy scifi, so I grabbed this time travel novella by him. The description is about the lone survivor of the time war setting up his home at what he thinks of as the end of time, only to discover there is a future after all. That’s broadly true, but really this is about a sociopath being a sociopath and then meeting another sociopath to hook up with. It has a funny, breezy tone, and I can see circumstances where this would have landed right with me, but at this particular moment it absolutely did not scratch the chewy scifi itch I was having. I will say that this novella is doing something funny/unusual with time travel and childbearing/being childfree that I enjoyed conceptually, even though the story itself was not what I wanted.
Content notes: Lots of murder, recollections of futuristic war