Children of Ruin

The sequel runs the first book’s experiment again with a different animal: another terraforming mission, another uplift, and this time octopuses — whose cognition is distributed through their limbs, so their civilisation thinks in a way that is much harder to negotiate with than the spiders’ was. A second, genuinely non-cognate intelligence is also found, and the book’s real subject becomes the cost of first contact when neither side’s concepts translate.

Context: B tier, “also worth reading,” volume two of the Children of Time entry. Follows Children of Time directly and assumes its ending.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Adrian Tchaikovsky — the author.
• Children of Time — volume one, and the starting point.
• Children of Memory — volume three.
• Evolution — the mechanism the series runs on.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.