#children of ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

[shadowpeople]

I hope Adrian Tchaikovsky doesn't feel like he can't write any more books about sentient spiders just because he's done it multiple times already. Because I don't think I have a limit in all honesty. There's no point at which I'd be like "ok Adrian, that's enough sentient spiders!" He could keep writing books about sentient spiders indefinitely and I would just keep reading them.

[crowreys-wormstache]

One of these days Adrian Tchaikovsky is gonna drop a novel about sentient spacefaring leeches and for about 600 pages I'm gonna be forced to care about those bastard creatures and I'm gonna LIKE IT

[azures-grace]

Realizing other people have read the Children of Time series fills me with so much joy.

If you've read that book PLEASE rb this so I have people to talk to about it. I'm so normal about it.

[nekoprankster218]

props to Children of Ruin for turning the phrase “going on an adventure” into something terrifying and subsequently executing the rare text-based jumpscare with it

[approximateknowledge]

thinking about the implications of artifabian

kern's a guy but only as a spider

good for him

[rorybluez]

one of the joys of finishing children of time is a bunch of fans making sure to reply to almost every single "woah! Portia spiders are so intelligent" comment with an "allow me to introduce you to CoT books!!" and promote them with the vigour of a bachelor in marketing degree. You can nearly feel the overly enthusiastic desire to infodump behind their comments (tbh same). Shout-out to those meme spreading fellow spider fans, I salute you.

[thesarkycoder]

Hey so this is going to maybe turn into an Adrian Tchaikovsky blog for a few days while I process the Children of Time trilogy, so if you’re not into the following I suggest you leave

Spider matriarchy

Single artist octopus dad and his eight rowdy kids

“So I accidentally Cronenburged the entire available human race and a Seaworld, big oof amirite”

Am I smart or am I just several pairs of hyper-fixated crows

Worst Red Dead Online RP Server

[humandisastersquad]

“We’re going on an adventure!”

[twogeeseinatrenchcoat]

Only in Children of Time would you ever find a space battle between hyper-intelligent spiders and octopi with an AI stored in a shit ton of ants with a god complex controlling the spider's ship.

Gonna go on a small rant here.

Adrian Tchaikovsky writes other species/alien species so well. Like, so well. He has ideas that are so out there I would never even think of them, let alone know how to incorporate it. He's just so good at writing something so entirely different from anything people are used to, and I love that. It makes everything in the books 100x better, and much more intriguing.

He also does a great job with the science-y side of it. He manages to fit in all of this random information about cell structures and DNA and technology and how the different species think, and it's seamlessly incorporated with the rest of the story. Nothing gets bogged down by a random bunch of information about how different the cells of the animals on this new planet are, because it fits. He's not just putting it there for "oh hey, it's a sci-fi book, gotta have some science-y mumbo jumbo in there," no, it actually adds to the story. It serves to show just how different, how alien everything is.

Go read the books, I'd recommend them for anyone who enjoys sci-fi and can get through fairly wordy books. They're around 500-600 pages each.

[matrose]

children of time AND ruin AND memory 💯

[bigmaxporter]

I feel like a fucking sleeper agent

[crowreys-wormstache]

The Avrana Kern of Theseus

[complainingatthevoid]

So I just finished reading Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and despite the fact that I’m still chewing on it, I can definitely say that I really liked it.

It’s about so many things I enjoy: strange aliens, conversations about the nature of humanity and identity, AIs with complicated relationships to humanity, creative scifi settings, and some genuinely unsettling horror bits. And yet somehow, like Children of Time, it still manages to be optimistic where it counts. So many horrible things happen, so many seemingly impossible tasks are faced, and there still room in the universe for people trying to fix things, and to understand each other, no matter how difficult that is in a massive and strange universe.

It’s probably some of my favorite hard scifi I’ve read in a while.

“The octopus knew he was happy, and it loved him, or valued him, or felt something enough that his happiness was important to it. And that in itself is a miracle; that is the grand triumph Senkovi never grasped, that his creatures could empathize, could apply a theory of mind to entities quite unlike themselves, could be great-hearted enough to be happy that someone else was laughing, even if they couldn’t get the joke.”

[nekoprankster218]

my sci-fi parasite experience recently

[approximateknowledge]

i am so normal about the chidren of time trilogy (lie)

[izzidane]