Reviews

• 面白い

  読み始めると止まらなくなる。

• A worthy followup to Children of Time

  I struggled with whether to give the book 4 or 5 stars, and my actual score is probably more of a 4.5. On the one hand, this book is much more consistent than Children of Time. It is consistently engaging throughout and there is nothing quite as sluggish as the human segments of that first book. On the other hand, the peaks have been flattened as well as the valleys. There are a few mind-blowing moments, and I love how the book really goes on an adventure, but nothing quite compares to the rise of Portiid civilization from book 1. I will say that Tchaikovsky is easily one of my favorite current authors. His output is nothing short of prolific and I've yet to read anything by him that was less than very good. If you already read and liked Children of Time, you'll need very little convincing to give this sequel a try, and I encourage everyone to check out his other works.

• Not Ruined The Series but a Step Down

  I’m not sure if I reviewed the first book but it was an enjoyable clash of alien cultures with a very detailed history of alien life evolving in a far off world. I liked the human politics and drastic changes that society took to survive deep space travel. This sequel has elements of that but never quite reaches its grandness. The octopus race evolves but I feel we see only highlights and the main conflict seems small and ended suddenly that it felt anticlimactic. Still, this book throws up some interesting scientific ideas and consequences to consider. A worthy read, just don’t expect a complicated web.

• Like the First Novel, but Pumped Up on Steroids

  Kudos to Adrian Tchaikovsky for his new book: Children of Ruin is not just as good as, but even better than its prequel. This is a feat very few writers can pull off. The first book, Children of Time, followed the accidental development of a sentient arachnid civilisation on a planet terraformed and abandoned by humans and its inevitable stand-off with the last survivors of the human kind fleeing from a ravaged and uninhabitable Earth to a planet they think is rightfully theirs. Grand-scale, epically ambitious and, most importantly, biologically plausible, Children of Time was an enormous reward to read. However, it was also sleepy and long-winded, with a somewhat languid plot and entire chapters that like a Discovery documentary than genuine fiction. This is why I was hardly ecstatic when I found out that there was going to be a sequel—but, boy, was I proven wrong! The plot of Children of Ruin kicks off exactly where Children of Time ended: with a joint expedition of humans and arachnids, long living side-by-side peacefully, to another human-terraformed world, which has been sending inscrutable radio signals. This expedition’s timeline goes side-by-side with the timeline of the human terraforming crew millennia before, as it starts terraforming one of the two Goldilocks planets in the system and makes a terrifying discovery on the other one. The plot reminds very much of and its structure copies, for the most part, Children of Time, with the same uplifting of a sentient Earth-based species, this time octopuses, and with the same imminent stand-off between civilisations. But despite this lack of originality, Children of Ruin does all of this brilliantly, while the added horror subplot and a much, much tighter writing ensure a much more engaging plot. Adrian Tchaikovsky more or less takes what was best about Children of Time: the audacious scale and the plausible biology, and infuses it with so much more dynamics and energy as to you keep you on edge the entire time, something the first book was only able to do at the very end. What is perhaps most appealing about both Children of Time and Children of Ruin though is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s incredibly optimistic view of the universe, where the unknown is an opportunity rather than a threat and where differences do not necessarily need to be resolved by conflict, but can end up in mutually beneficial cooperation. This is an incredibly different outlook than that of most modern authors and also a very likeable one, considering the times we all live in.

• Stellar

  Children of Time did not need a second book, it left no loose strands at the end. But Children of Ruin builds and expands on the universe, and manages to feel as fresh and exciting as the first book

• A worthy sequel

  Wow! I really love how the author portrays non humans in both the first book and this sequel. So many sci-fi books really too heavily on anthropomorphism of non human character, but definitely not in this book (or the last). I don't think I've ever even read anything quite like them. The story itself is really good, if at times a *little* similar too its predecessor. Also, there was one event at the beginning that felt a bit too...... convenient for the sake of story telling. But overall, it was just as entertaining as the first, and some of the best sci-fi I've read in a while.

• Much worse than book 1

  Currently forcing my way through the final 170 pages. It has been a slog from the start. Thus far, the book could have been about half it's length without missing anything. Will not be picking up book #3 after this.

• TAN BUENO COMO EL ANTERIOR, que conviene leer previamente

  Muy bueno, tanto como el anterior , CHILDREN OF TIME. La imaginacion del escritor describiendo civilizaciones alienigenas es increíble.

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