Literature / Children of Memory

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Children of Memory is the third novel in the series. Late Arrival Spoilers for Children of Time and Children of Ruin are unmarked on this page.

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 Imirans.

And both factions discovered a mysterious alien signal on the planet, which even the legendary Captain Holt did not return from investigating...

Succeeded in 2026 by Children of Strife.

Children of Memory contains examples of:

• Alien Among Us: The entire crew of the Skipper is non-human. The landing party (two Portiids, one Octopus, and a These of We colony) masquerades as humans in the settlement of Landfall. They are all very familiar with humans, but not with this particular culture.
• Alien Fair Folk: Liff can only conceptualize the alien people who walk amongst the townsfolk by using tropes from her fairy tales.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: A recurring debate. Kindness demands that the Skipper step in to aid the ailing Imir colony, but if that aid means destroying their culture, is that an acceptable cost?
• All Just a Dream: Paul, Fabien, Portia, the Corvids, and certain values of Kern and Miranda never went down to the surface of Imir. Likewise, Liff never even existed, as the real Captain Holt's shuttle broke up during re-entry. The crew theorizes that Liff was the engine experiencing its own simulation from the inside. The reader is meant to see it as an invocation of this trope, in order to lead into the greater themes about the nature of sentience and whether Liff and greater Landfall might qualify after all.
• Anachronic Order:
  • The story jumps between two different starship arrivals at Imir and the hardscrabble life in the colony.
  • Within the stories set on Imir, Liff's memories shift among various time periods in the settlement's history, from first landing, though prosperity and growth, to final collapse.
• Bio Punk:
  • The Portiid's Living Ships, Organic Technology, and transhumanism make a reappearance.
  • Using the genetic stock available in Enkidu's library, their scientists must engineer a self-sustaining ecosystem that can live on Imir, and support humans — and they must do so in an extremely short time. That they are able to do so is remarkable, but see Crippling Overspecialization for details.
  • With limited farm species available, the Imir colonists bred pigs to fill every role — they have milk pigs, draft pigs, and guard pigs.
• Bird People: The Corvids of Rourke are very much avian in form, with no anthropomorphic features.
• Bizarre Seasons: Imir doesn't have Spring; it has Storm and After-Storm, which are the stormy seasons before and after the growing season.
• Body Horror: From the perspective of the citizens of Landfall, this is what happens when they try to execute Miranda's group and their true nature is revealed.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: These of We were the Big Bad of Children of Ruin. The central character of Children of Memory is a colony of These of We in the form of an artificial human body, copied from an original with her consent.
• Contrived Coincidence: The Skipper is one of the first ships to reach Rourke, a pair of Corvids decide to accompany them, and their next stop is Imir. In a galaxy that is very sparsely populated, one ship making back-to-back first contacts, and the first having direct bearing on the second, is very unlikely. (This is not the Enterprise, after all.)
• Crippling Overspecialization: Imir's ecosystem, as built by the crew of the Enkidu, consists of a very small number of species that they managed to get established on the planet: A few crops, one species of tree, one species of fungus, one species of beetle, one species of worm, one species of fly, one species of spider, and pigs bred into every form humans might need. It worked for a while, but once one thing went wrong, everything started to fall apart. In particular, the beetles evolved far faster than anything else on the planet, filling every niche and outcompeting everything, including themselves.
• Death World: Of the boring, realistic variety. Imir has breathable air, but crops and ecosystems struggle to survive because it has literally nothing else: no soil, no microbes, none of the precursors that would allow for a real ecosystem. The summers and winters are harsh, and spring brings fierce storms. Rourke is likewise barren with breathable air, but has toxic chemistry instead that gives all Earthly life cancer within a few years.
• The Dividual: Gethli and Gothi are absolutely inseparable, as are all Corvid sibling pairs. They in fact function as a single mind, with one storing all data and the other analyzing it. One of their first actions aboard the Skipper is to dismantle a stasis pod and rebuild it to accommodate the two of them together.
• Existential Horror: As their experiences make less and less causal sense, Liff and Miranda question their reality and identity.
• Expy:
  • The Corvid sibling pairings in general, and Gothi and Gethli in particular, are inspired by Odin's ravens Huginn and Muninn, whose names are often interpreted as "thought" and "memory." Given the way their bipartite mind works, it's a pretty clear homage. They serve Kern as familiars, flying across the world and gathering information, just as Huginn and Muninn served Odin.
  • On the other hand, their humorous and argumentative dialogue and occasionally comic role may remind readers of two other famous corvids, the animated magpies Heckle and Jeckle.
• Fantastic Measurement System: Imir has both a short rotational period and short orbital period. Liff is frequently stated to be twenty-six, just entering adolescence, so a year on Imir is about half as long as a year on earth. This becomes a bit of a Red Herring, since one of the strange things in the narrative of Imir is that events sometimes seem to have happened very close to each other in time, and sometimes very far apart.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Discovered at the end of the previous book, it's now in use throughout the sentient coalition. However, they also still use stasis pods. This could indicate that although faster than light, travel still has a significant duration (e.g., crossing a thousand light years still taking several subjective years), or could be for slower in-system travel, which can also take months or years.
• First Contact: This time, the isolated humans of Imir are the contacted by the combined sentient culture.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Liff has a dream where she's the only one in the world. That was how her story ended, in the first iteration — as the colony's last survivor.
  • The story of Heorest Holt's first landing in history of the colony places a heavy emphasis on the extreme skill required to land successfully with such ancient hardware. Because in reality, he didn't succeed.
  • Despite a willingness to Infodump aspects of the coalition culture and technology, the method by which Portia, Fabien, Paul, and the Corvids have been given human forms (including Gethli and Gothi's apparent ability to switch between forms at will) is never explained. It's because they didn't. The engine extrapolated what their infiltration would look like, if there had been a colony to infiltrate.
• Glamour Failure: Horrifying, despite it happening to sympathetic characters. When Miranda and her friends are hanged, they revert to their non-human forms. It says a lot that Fabian and Portia turning into giant spiders is the least horrible. Paul turns into a boneless octopus while his "children" merge with him and become his arms again, and then Miranda is unleashed as the full all-devouring plague of memories she was so long ago. It's so horrible that Liff has nightmares of it despite not actually remembering it.
• A Glitch in the Matrix: Being that the entire history of Landfall is a simulation, inconsistencies start appearing, which is what allows the Skipper crew to begin solving the mystery of what has happened, and is still happening.
• Human Disguise: Miranda's nonhuman companions are somehow able to take on human forms to infiltrate and study Imir, with subtle eccentricities reflecting their Bizarre Alien Psychology. Fabian, for example, has a habit of tapping his hands on surfaces, while Paul can't speak and is always accompanied by eight strangely coordinated children. Miranda is in fact the best at this, as the original Miranda was a true human who allowed These of We to "learn" her, and therefore the current Miranda has a perfect record of her mind to work with. That the mechanism of this transformation is never explained is Foreshadowing of The Reveal.
• Human Popsicle: Played for tragedy on the Enkidu. When the colonists started having children, they never found the space to bring down new colonists, leaving the vast majority still frozen on the ship. These became a cultural boogeyman, a rival society that might wake up at any moment and be justifiably vengeful for being abandoned. In the end, they never wake, and die in their sleep before the Skipper arrives.
• Interspecies Friendship: The crew of the Skipper and their civilization as a whole.
• It Can Think: As in previous books, the question of sapience is a central theme. The Corvids of Rourke come in pairs that each form half of a Hive Mind; the individuals are just animals, but are they more than that when working together? At what point does something go from a "complex system" to a truly sapient person? The Corvids claim that if they are sapient, then everything is—and they come down on the side that they are not sapient, and therefore nothing is. The other members of the crew have a much broader view on the subject. It becomes most relevant with the simulation. While it's true that no one in the simulation ever existed outside it, and it's been repeating the exact same loop for who knows how long, the crew largely agrees that everyone inside is still a real person deserving of freedom and choice... which brings up the question of how exactly they're supposed to give those people that, when taking anyone out will change the simulation. They remove Liff, the last survivor, so that she can make the choice, and she realizes that the simulation itself might also be intelligent. The book ends with Liff seemingly making contact with it.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: A deliberate example, with this book introducing a significant mystery element along with speculative fiction and adventure. The combination of Anachronic Order and Revealing Continuity Lapses has the characters, and the reader, trying to resolve the Ontological Mystery of Landfall's past and present.
• Literal Data Transfer: Apparently, inserting someone into the simulation requires removing them from reality; and, similarly, you can't "extract" someone from the simulation without actually removing them from it, since the only reason Liff is safe to remove is because she's the last person in there. No one, at any point, suggests that there's anything wrong about this - including Kern, a product of Brain Uploading who is very capable of copying herself, but, apparently, for unspecified reasons, not Liff.
• Lost Colony: Imir 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.
• Magically Binding Contract: Liff has learned from her storybook that a witch can be bound in a contract if a young girl is sufficiently brave and resourceful. She tries to invoke this with Kern, who just finds it annoying.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The Colony Ship in this book is named Enkidu, for a companion of Gilgamesh in Sumerian mythology. The ship Enkidu is a sibling ship to the Gilgamesh from the first book of the trilogy.
  • The Enkidu's heavy shuttle is the Urshanabi, which is interesting for a variety of reasons. Urshanabi also appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh, so it fits with the Theme Naming of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. As described on his character page, Urshanabi was The Ferryman, carrying "newly arrived souls in his boat into the underworld," and the shuttle is transporting the colonists to a new life in a new world. His description is also very interesting, as he had the head of a bird (relating to the Corvids), and had four hands and feet (relating to the eight-limbed Portiids and Octopodes). These last two items could be strictly coincidental, but it's hard to say.
• Meat Puppet: Miranda, Portia, Fabian, and Paul all wear artificial human bodies on Imir.
• Mind Screw: Starting with Liff insisting that Heorest Holt is her grandfather that she has many happy memories with and her parents reacting with surprise because he died when she was an infant, more and more of Landfall's history seems to be mutually exclusive as the story goes on. One particularly loud example is when Miranda is explained as a colonist defrosted from the Enkidu's cargo hold, when the reader knows that she isn't even human.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Miranda, who is in fact a sentient colony of potential Grey Goo masquerading as a human, occasionally has thoughts which remind her of her primal nature. At one point, it appears that she may have reverted to this and been responsible for the destruction of the Imir colony.
• Neglectful Precursors: Again, the terraforming project. The Enkidu colonists expect to find a verdant planet; instead, they discover breathable air but little other life.
• No One Could Survive That!: At one point, a rain-saturated hillside gives way, burying Liff under a landslide. When Miranda digs her out, she is clearly dead. In the next scene, she is recovering at Miranda's outland farmhouse.
• Obsessively Organized: A Corvid trait. The "memory" half of The Dividual must fit all data into a coherent pattern, and continue "cataloguing the changes." When this can't be done with some of the signal data from Landfall, it leads to Gethli and Gothi Spotting the Thread.
• 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. It's a dark take on the theme, showing how such communities can descend into insular paranoia when things go bad.
• "Rashomon"-Style: With a twist: the first-person perspectives make the experiences seem reliable, so why do events contradict each other...?
• Revealing Continuity Lapse: Drive much of the plot. Liff's narrative begins with her seeing her grandfather Holt walking into the woods, despite the fact that everyone else is adamant her grandfather has been dead for years. These inconsistencies grow both more common and more severe as the book goes on, culminating in the reveal that Imir exists inside a simulation, and the simulation is breaking down.
• Retcon: A small one. The epilogue of Children of Ruin implied that the Corvids had fully integrated into coalition society. In this book, the Skipper only just made first contact and then continues on to Imir, with the operation there being the first collaboration between all five species. Though the other Corvids arriving at the end imply that this came to pass while Miranda was on her adventure.
• The Reveal:
  • The first one: The colony is inside a simulation, and Miranda's presence is causing glitches.
  • And later, a much bigger one: There never was a colony. The shuttle Urshanabi crashed on its first trip, and the machine simulated everything from a theoretical successful landing to the death of the colony.
• The Scapegoat: As the settlement struggles, people become fearful of strangers, and the militia arrests Miranda's group for standing out: Portia is a physically strong, independent woman; Fabian is too good of a mechanic; Paul is an artist who cannot speak; and Miranda is a teacher putting strange ideas in children's heads.
• Sequel Hook: It is now known that there is, or at least was, another intelligent, technologically advanced race in the galaxy. Which raises the question of why they would leave an incredibly powerful simulation engine on an uninhabited planet, and whether they are still out there.
• Society of Immortals: By this point, Miranda's multi-species fraternity has mastered mind-copying, cloning, and life extension to the point that any form of death is absolutely optional. Generally, the first sign that people are considering it is when they start allowing themselves to age.
• Sole Survivor: The truth behind Liff's existence is that she is the very last of Imir's colonists to survive, after everything goes bad. The simulation therefore invests an abnormal amount of processing power in her, which is why she appears in multiple time periods and why so much of its strangeness revolves around her. It also means Miranda can extract her from the simulation without guilt, because pulling her out at the very end of the timeline won't change anything.
• Spotting the Thread: When the Skipper is in orbit over Imir, the Corvids are the first to catch on that something is very wrong with the data they are receiving from the surface. Their extreme pattern-recognition ability is in fact an obsessive need to make data fit into meaningful and consistent patterns. They become more and more agitated by signal data that just can't be reconciled, and eventually the other crew start to see the problem, too.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien:
  • Despite her technological origin and her denials, "witch" fits Kern quite well.
  • Whatever ancient species built the simulation machinery on Imir was advanced enough to simulate the entire lifecycle of a human colony, a century or more from first landing to extinction, based on whatever they salvaged from the crash of the Urshanabi and data retrieved from Enkidu. Their simulation was good enough that the new visitors were absorbed into it and believed it was real. And data the Skipper crew collected from orbit also made it look like there was actually a colony there, but that also was part of the simulation.
• 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"). It is also similar to Mímir, the keeper of knowledge and wisdom and ally of Odin.
  • 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."
  • Heorest 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.
  • Oddly averted with Gethli and Gothi, who are clearly expies of Huginn and Muninn (Odin's ravens), but do not share their names.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Liff and Miranda alike wonder: what do the townsfolk all know but aren't telling them?
• Wham Shot: From the reader's perspective. Although small inconsistencies had been appearing, probably the most jarring is a memory in which Miranda disembarks from Urshanabi along with other colonists retrieved from cryosleep aboard Enkidu. The reader knows she was not a colonist, and even in-universe, her cover story is that she moved into Landfall from an outlying farm. So what is she doing on that shuttle?
• 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...
  • Liff, on the other hand, is searching in the woods for a benevolent witch, whom she believes she can obligate to help her find her grandfather.