In the 2022 sequel to Children of Time (2015) and Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky brings his trademark Bizarre Alien Psychology and First Contact story to a down-to-earth pastoral setting. The characters are more straightforward, but the timeline is a Westworld-esque mystery.
Another ark ship fleeing Earth, the Enkidu, made it to a different terraformed planet. Unlike Kern's World, the planet Imir has no competing civilization — but not much of a biosphere either. For a time, the colony scrapes out a tough, low-tech, pastoral existence. But the planet is dying. As crops fail and fungus rots the woods, guilt and paranoia rot the colony from within. Liff Holt, precocious child and granddaughter of the Enkidu's captain, chases a ghost and a witch in the woods. And something about Liff's reality doesn't make sense...
Unbeknownst to the colony, the exploration starship Skipper, containing a pan-species crew of (mostly) descendants of Earth, has arrived, and are tiptoeing about how to contact and help the xenophobic Emirans.
And both factions discovered a mysterious alien signal on the planet, which even the legendary Captain Holt did not return from investigating...
Children of Memory contains examples of:
- Alien Fair Folk: Liff can only conceptualize the alien people who walk amongst the townsfolk by using tropes from her fairy tales.
- Anachronic Order: The story jumps between two different starship arrivals at Imir and the hardscrabble life in the colony.
- Bio Punk: The Portiid's Living Ships, Organic Technology, and transhumanism make a reappearance. With limited farm species available, the Imir colonists bred pigs to fill every role — they have milk pigs, draft pigs, and guard pigs.
- Bizarre Seasons: Emir doesn't have Spring; it has Storm and After-Storm.
- Death World: Of the boring, realistic variety. Imir has breathable air, but crops and ecosystems struggle to survive. The summers and winters are harsh, and spring brings fierce storms. Rourc is likewise barren with breathable air, but has toxic chemistry instead.
- Existential Horror: As their experiences make less and less causal sense, Liff and Miranda question their reality and identity.
- First Contact: This time, humans are the contacted.
- Glamour Failure: Horrifying, despite it happening to sympathetic characters.
- Human Popsicle: Played for tragedy on the Enkidu.
- Interspecies Friendship: The crew of the Skipper and their civilization as a whole.
- Lost Colony: Emir fares far less well than Kern's world. The printers the colonists brought from Earth couldn't print new printers, and they couldn't find the rare elements for advanced technology, so eventually, the high-tech machines failed, leaving them at a diesel and analog tech level.
- Neglectful Precursors: Again, the terraforming project. The Enkidu colonists expect to find a verdant planet; instead, they discover breathable air but little other life.
- Once More, with Clarity: After each reveal, events hinted at are shown in full detail.
- Ontological Mystery: It starts at In Medias Res and builds. How the colony descended to the state Liff lives through is the first act mystery. And then the viewpoints and timelines start to contradict each other...
- Pastoral Science Fiction: Most of the plot happens in the small town of Landfall and the surrounding farms and woods.
- "Rashomon"-Style: With a twist: the first-person perspectives make the experiences seem reliable, so why do events contradict each other...?
- Sole Survivor: Liff's claim to fame.
- Sufficiently Advanced Alien: Despite her technological origin and her denials, "witch" fits Kern quite well.
- Theme Naming: Imir and some of the colonists inhabiting it are named from Norse mythology.
- Imir itself comes from Ymir
, the father of all jötunn (the rivals to the gods often translated as "trolls" or "giants") - Liff is part of the Ragnarok myth — she and her lover Lífþrasir are prophesied to be the sole survivors of the fall of the gods, who will then repopulate the world. Which turns out to be a Meaningful Name when Liff ends up as the final survivor in the colony simulation, and then the first of its populace to be granted a new life in the "real world."
- Hoerest Holt is a nod to Hoddmímis Holt, the forest where Liff and Lífþrasir will hide from the destruction of Ragnarok.
- Helena Garm is named for the wolf Garm or Garmr, which guards the gate of Hel and plays a role in Ragnarok.
- Imir itself comes from Ymir
- Town with a Dark Secret: Liff and Miranda alike wonder: what do the townsfolk all know but aren't telling them?
- Witch Hunt: From the beginning, the town of Landfall has been paranoid about "Seccers" among them. Tensions build as the crops fail and refugees flood in...
