eBook, 406 pages

English language

Published Jan. 31, 2023 by Orbit.

ISBN:
978-0-316-46651-6
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4 stars (3 reviews)

Earth failed. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, Heorest Holt, carried its precious human cargo to a potential new paradise. Generations later, this fragile colony has managed to survive, eking out a hardy existence. Yet life is tough, and much technological knowledge has been lost.

Then strangers appear. They possess unparalleled knowledge and thrilling technology – and they've arrived from another world to help humanity’s colonies. But not all is as it seems, and the price of the strangers' help may be the colony itself.

6 editions

Worth persevering

4 stars

This is the third -- and I believe final -- installment in Adrian Tchaikovsky's acclaimed Children of Time series.

The action once again moves on to another alien world but with many of the same characters and species from the earlier two books. And of course we are introduced to additional new intelligences, as you'd expect from the earlier stories' trajectories.

However it took me well over half the book to really get into it. The multiple plots seemed not only hard to keep track of, but self-contradictory at times as well. Eventually everything does fall into place and there are enough plot twists to keep you intrigued right to the end, but there were definitely times when I had to force myself to keep reading as the frustration was starting to get too much.

I'm glad I kept going, though. In the last third of the book many of …

Children of Memory

4 stars

Children of Memory is the third (and final?) book in the Children of Time saga. I have very mixed feelings about this book (and also this series). If I had to sum up my feelings, the last 50 pages of this book are absolutely excellent but the middle ~200 pages drag on for quite some time. If I had to review the series as a whole, I am glad I read these three books personally, but my recommendation for others who hadn't read any would be to read the first book and stop there.

One thing I think this series does well is that each book has a very different vibe overall. Book one is very space opera / evolutionary theater, book two adds in a significant horror element, and book three feels more like a mystery (fairytale?) of strange contradictory events. I strongly agree with Tak, who described this …