Children of Memory

Children of Time, Book Three

English language

Published Nov. 7, 2022 by Pan Macmillan.

ISBN:
978-1-5290-8717-8
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4 stars (6 reviews)

Earth is failing. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, Heorest Holt, carry its precious human cargo to a potential new Eden. 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 Liff, Holt’s granddaughter, hears whispers that the strangers in town aren’t from neighbouring farmland. That they possess unparalleled technology – and that they've arrived from another world. But not all questions are so easily answered, and their price may be the colony itself.

Children of Memory by Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky is a far-reaching space opera spanning generations, species and galaxies.

7 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 …

Review of 'Children of Memory' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I am afraid I am going to have to be a little hard here and say this barely scraped 4 stars for me. The middle really dragged. I can't really explain why without going into spoilers (which I am not a fan of doing in reviews). I will say that there wasn't the same sense of progress that you got from the first two books. A sense of something new developing. The middle third is very focused on a (to all appearances) regressive setting, thus the sense of the new wasn't there for me for a good chunk of this read.
The ideas are still top tier. The book started well and the ending was satisfying. Maybe it needed a tighter edit, maybe I was just not in the right place for this.
Still, it is Tchaikovsky and my reservations could just be a me thing. It's still at least …

Review of 'Children of Memory' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Wow. Outstanding! This book is vastly different than the other two. I was frustrated with most of it and was sure I would be rating it 2 stars, maybe 3, even though the writing style was amazing, but the last hundred pages blew my mind.

Take all these 5 stars, Adrian, and go buy something nice with 'em.

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4 stars