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Literature / Children of Ruin

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"We're going on an adventure!!"
These of We

In the 2019 sequel to Children of Time (2015), Adrian Tchaikovsky tops his previous work with even stranger aliens. This time, the backstory is tightly woven with a messy first contact story.

The starship Voyager ventures from Kern's World to investigate a signal from an alien star. They discover a strange civilization and traces of Earth. As they struggle to communicate and unravel the mysterious history of this solar system, their curiosity and the Language Barrier unwittingly takes them towards an ancient peril.

Followed by the 2022 Children of Memory.


Children of Ruin contains examples of:

  • And the Adventure Continues: The final scene is very far in the future, where humans, spiders, mantis shrimp, octopodes, These of We, and corvids have all been happily exploring the galaxy together and now find evidence of Precursors.
  • The Assimilator: These of We: a brown goop that eats brains.
  • Battle in the Center of the Mind: Kern, Meshner's copy, and Rahni/These of We fight in Meshner's implant.
  • Benevolent Precursors: The octopus civilization reveres Senkovi as a loving father God.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: The octopodes are as fluid in belief and allegiance as their boneless bodies. At a public debate, one debater literally wrestles his opponent into submission... then switches sides to her views.
  • Body Horror: These of We takes over your mind and breaks your body... which you don't even realize until the stupor slips and a glimpse of pain and wrongly bent limbs leaks into your awareness.
  • Brain Uploading: Happens in two different ways:
    1. Kern discovers that Meshner's implant, meant for the interpreting and sharing of memories, has been copying his personality this whole time.
    2. These of We saves and disseminates copies of each human it assimilates. Rahni finishes her research on These of We after she has been dead for years.
  • Kirk Summation: Kern shows These of We how unfulfilling it would be to assimilate the universe.
  • Recursive Translation: The chain of communication would be hilariously madcap if tentacles weren't itching to launch missiles: sentient slime mold These of We to the post-human Kern to spider Portia to Human Helena to the octopus diplomat Paul to the octopus crew of The Profundity of Depth to the other octopus warships.
  • Rival Science Teams: Helena and Portia v.s. Fabian and Meshner. Both are trying to solve Portiid-Human communication, since otherwise it all has to be routed through Kern. Helena's team uses linguistics. Fabian's team uses brain surgery!
  • Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom: The octopus ships have pretentiously grand names, even when simplified into words, like The Profundity of Depth, The Without Peering Within, or The Shell that Echoes Only.
  • Neglectful Precursors: The octopus civilization despises Baltiel as the bringer of plague. They are so traumatized by their history that after one look at the human form, they start shooting.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: As Boltiel returns from Nod infected with the plague, Senkovi shoots down his shuttle... which crash lands on Damascus. Senkovi successfully warns the octopus to avoid the capsule and its planet of origin, a warning that holds for thousands of years. Until...
  • Starfish Aliens: The octopus-people of Damascus, as uplifted octopodes, are bizarre by human standards. They have a central brain and eight equally large auxiliary brains, one for each tentacle, as do real octopodes. Tchaikovsky has an answer for "what is it like to be an octopus?": a seat of consciousness (the Crown) that is pure Id, which relies on the logical and calculating arm-brains (the Reach) to implement its desires.
  • Tactful Translation: The Human crew of the Voyager communicate with the Portiids via Kern's translation. Helena, with her own translators, discovers that Kern is downplaying Bianca's megalomania.
  • Tempting Fate: "Parasites are so specialized to their host that this alien ecosystem is perfectly safe."
  • The Virus: A Puppeteer Parasite for human beings that pushes the body literally past the breaking point. The victim's muscles tear, ligaments snap, and joints bend the wrong way. And it's even more grotesque for the octopodes: their main brain and their arm ganglia fight for dominance so the infected creature tears itself apart.
  • Uncanny Valley:
    • Discussed. The spider observer is sure a human would feel it, but they are not human.
    • Kern herself as well. Not only is she short on processing power to simulate emotions, but even when she was human, she was bad at them. Her Slasher Smile is not as reassuring as she hopes.
  • Uplifted Animal: Senkovi brought octopodes from Earth to serve as undersea workers. Well, that's what he told his coworkers. The truth is he was always looking for an excuse to let them inherit the world they were helping to terraform. Then the rest of his crew died, and suddenly he didn't actually have a choice in the matter anymore.
  • Xenofiction: The octopus-people are even stranger than the spider-people from the last book. The octopus-people are passionate, emotive, and every other metaphor involves crabs or clams. They wear their indecision and conflicting desires on their sleeves, instead of pretending to be consistent like we self-deluding monkeys.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: When These of We finally gets loose on Damascus, it is impossible to quarantine any one of part of an ocean planet. Their population literally tears itself apart.

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