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Sins of the Children

asteriskmag.com

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Adrian Tchaikovsky is really good at these alien ecosystems kind of thing (his Children of * range being quite good). This was a terrific short story. One thing I am curious about is whether there is a different kind of science fiction out there. The driving thread through all of modern English sci-fi is "we shouldn't go out there and do anything; we are the bad that ruins a delicate thing". That's a cool story but somewhat overly tropey at this point I think. This short story, the Avatar series, they have this ecological moralizing. AT is creative enough that the novel ideas (single species life-cycle planet) carry the tale even though the moral thread is the same as the Avatar movie: corporations destroy ecosystems they don't understand in the resource pursuit.

I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?

A thing I enjoy about other cultures is seeing what is unusually different about them. In the Three Body Problem, spoilers to follow for the series, humanity aren't The Bad Guys With Agency. We aren't even The Big Bad or The Big Good. We're sort of just other participants in this universe. The dual vector foil is employed by someone else, the guys who want space back from the pocket dimension to reboot the universe are just someone else, everything is someone else. We are bit part players in this play.

This goes on even to a few movies. The Wandering Earth movie (somewhat different from the short story) has this part at the end (obvious spoilers to follow) where the heroes accomplish the task and reboot their Earth Engine after conquering all odds - only for the camera to zoom out and show numerous other teams also having done the same. This wasn't the only struggle won. Cool alternative tale where it isn't so much One Team Saves The World or One Team Ruins The World.

> I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?

Hyperion? Ringworld? Rendezvous with Rama? Brin's Uplift trilogy? Neuromancer? A Fire Upon the Deep? Robinson's Mars trilogy?

I'm just going through Hugo novel winners, picking some of the ones I've read:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award#Categories

Haha yes, these are all fantastic. But they're not 'modern' right? i.e. some of these I read as a child. They're all pre-2000s, and we're a quarter of the way through this century.

Thank you to everyone else for recommendations. I'll have to give KSR's Aurora a shot. I couldn't get into New York 2140 very much but I'm down to try again.

QNTM's There is no Antimemetics Division. It was a free set of short stories that he self-published. They were so good he got a publishing deal, and now you can buy the reimagined version at any bookstore. I personally prefer the original. Easily my favorite book of the last 5-10 years. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

The Wikipedia article has every winner and nominee, including 2025, and all (?) of the books seems to have an article themselves so you can get a quick synopsis to see if the book matches what you want. You can probably do worse for a short list of reading candidates.

There are Youtube channels that focus on scifi reading, and they probably have recent 'best of 2025' videos.

(I haven't read "modern" sci-fi as much relative to my youth (GenXer), since I'm most doing non-fictional lately.)

The Expanse, The Captive's War, The Divide (Dewes), any of David Weber's series, The Palladium Wars, The Interdependency, The Light Brigade, Seveneves. All relatively recent publications. Certainly some interhuman conflict involved in many of them, but they're not banging you on the head that humans are ultimately bad.

Seveneves is extremely harsh against at least some humans I'd say. The Expanse has the slogan "you had paradise, and you paved it" repeated a few times.

The Expanse has some environmentalist characters in it, but I think the series as a whole doesn't tend that way. In my reading of the series it portrays the human need to consume and reach further out as just as natural as anything else.

> any of David Weber's series

For a guy best known for a very bad plagiarism of CS Forester, I see him recommended way too often. Just read the real thing.

Everything is derivative. So what?

Hugo’s have shifted towards the soft scifi / fantasy / new weird. It’s not an absolute shift, but hard sf space operas seldom win nowaday

Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series is modern and without humans as the bad guys. And highly recommended too. The books are also more standalone than calling it a series would suggest, but he also has lots of other one-shot books, and a few trilogies, if that would be a better way for you to try him out. I got into him via the standalone Pushing Ice.

Yes, highly recommend Reynolds, generally, although the third Rev Space book takes some fortitude to get through.

> I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?

Was about to post some examples that I liked, but then realized that anything from the previous century (1900's) probably can't be called "modern" any more. And after that, realized that I don't think I've read any "modern" corporate-published SF by that standard. I'm getting old.

If fanfiction counts, I'm enjoying this: https://archiveofourown.org/series/3516793

There’s a subreddit called HFY which stands for “humanity, fuck yeah!” Which has little short stories about humanity being badass normally in a scifi setting in one way or another. https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY (I have Reddit blocked so can’t verify that’s the correct link)

The vast majority of the genre is utter trash, unfortunately. There are some true gems in the muck, but man are they hard to find. It turns out that most authors can't make humans seem cool without needing to make the aliens they encounter complete and utter morons.

Am I wrong to assume those are LLM slop?

But ya, I love that genre. eg Haldeman's The Forever War, Scalzi's Old Man's War, Robert Charles Wilson's Spin

I honestly stopped reading it a few years ago, so have no idea of the state of the sub, but if you sort by all time best most of them are pre-AI.

> One thing I am curious about is whether there is a different kind of science fiction out there.

One recommendation: Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora: We went there. It didn't work. We came back. We did good and bad things to each other along the way. It was beautiful and painful.

> A thing I enjoy about other cultures is seeing what is unusually different about them.

This is a very strong theme throughout Ursula Le Guin’s books and short stories; perhaps you might find those interesting.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

Startide Rising by David Brin

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

Semiosis by Sue Burke

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward

Solaris by Stanisław Lem

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Translation State by Ann Leckie

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

This is what sprang to mind as answering that sort of brief off the top of my head.

I loved Blindsight, Pandora's star and Solaris. Might check out the rest on your list.

You might enjoy Beckey Chamber's Galactic Commons series. She does a great job of creating all kinds of interesting characters and exploring them and what makes them unique.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell is very compelling.

And I seconded it below but I'll mention it again - the Bobiverse series is excellent with amazing exploration.

Solar punk as a genre is mainly optimistic. I just read and enjoyed the Monk and Robot novellas, also by Chambers - though I’m not sure they’re ‘scifi’ enough to scratch the itch this thread is about.

Try some CJ Cherryh. Her science fiction touches on many ethically-tricky concepts and difficult situations and explores different styles of alien interaction without a lot of the satirizing/politicking/moralizing that many use scifi and fantasy settings for.

I was just going to suggest pride of Chanur.

Reviewing Hugos last 20 years or so:

Ann Leckie is great, Tamsyn Muir is gothic horror lesbian necromancer-ish and super cool, Andy Weir is a full humanist in the best sense, Arkady Martine is a thoughtful writer I enjoy, Yoon Ha Lee was a fresh voice at time of pub, and worth reading, Cixin Liu fits your request, I love me some Stephenson novels, in your request category I recommend Anathem, Kim Stanley Robinson can be tiring, but is also pretty great, everything China Mieville has written is worth reading, full stop, Paolo Bacigalupi's adult fiction is fucking great, although I sort of bounced off his YA stuff, Vernor Vinge will read like near-history reportage, but was way ahead of its time when published, if you haven't read Iain M. Banks (also goes by Iain Banks for non-genre), you have 10-20 novels that are just fantastic waiting for you, Dan Simmons Hyperion is excellent, Bruce Sterling is worth reading.. Let me know if you get through this list.

Schild's ladder by Greg Egan is a pretty good novel for this. You have groups of people vying to collapse and try to coexist with a new but threatening form of nature, and I think both are treated as reasonable actors.

Most of Egan's work after his very early stuff believes deeply in post-scarcity humanity.

The Hyperion Cantos hits this topic. We're the good guys and we're the bad guys. And sometimes we're the bad guys through no malicious intent, just volume and social norms (the consul's tale in the first book). Other times we're the bad guys to do good things (Lamia's tale).

The first book is really good by itself. The others are just as good but very different and way more political (meaning covering the politics of that universe, not political like involving current day politics).

Give short story anthologies (like the "Best of Year" type) a look. The late great Garder Dozois was always my favorite, but I personally also get good hit rates from Neil Clarke and Jonathan Strahan, among others. There's a lot of good stuff in there... and bad stuff... and forgettable stuff. But that's part of the draw of short fiction.

> I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?

That's my problem with horror media as well. They all eventually devolve into the "humans were the real monsters all along" cliché.

In the sci-fi film Arrival (also based on a short story), humanity are kind of like irresponsible young students. If we get past our focus on war/conflict/us vs them perhaps we can learn new things from the aliens.

I think that breaks the style a little of 'humans bad for aliens' enough, right?

Either way I enjoyed Arrival (and the short story).

Greg Egan? His stuff is way out there, some may do the we're the baddies trope but most doesn't.

The Sun Eater series is an interesting one that kind of goes both ways. The big alien baddies are basically demons, and humanity gets a lot of love, but all the politicking and whatnot shows humanity to be both good and bad

Project Hail Mary?

Bobaverse series.

The Bob series by Dennis E. Taylor is amazing, and I highly recommend it. Very positive, very creative.

I've only read the first book, and that a while ago, but my memory is that, while humans are the focus of Thompson's Rosewater trilogy, they are again neither the Big Bad nor the Big Good.

"But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?"

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Personally, a story where there’s any clear-cut “baddies” at this point would violate immersion. We can realistically and objectively classify a given person as a psychopath, an egomaniac, etc. (and such a person can end up having a disproportionate influence over some part of history), but things are a little more nuanced when larger societies are concerned.

I think the Culture series by Iain M. Banks does mostly a good job at not being overly black and white, even though one of the sides has an obvious technological advantage.

Try reading Project Hail Mary

My kid got me hooked on Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Super fun.

It's of a genre called LitRPG. Exactly as you'd expect. And yet somehow Dinniman makes it work.

I hate myself for loving it. h/t Joan Jett & The Heartbreakers

The Children of (insert adjective) series by Adrian Tchaikovsky is really, really good, especially the second in the series. Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.

I concur on "really good" but have to disagree on the "series" part. Children of Time is a remarkable book, one of the best science fiction stories in a very long time.

Children of Ruin is ... okay. Children of Memory is not a good book, IMO. Both of these suffer from the same mysticism-used-to-spin-up-a-red-reset-button plot device plague that fundamentally guts Xenocide. Nowhere as bad as that, of course, but the unpleasant echoes are there.

As it happens I'm in the middle of the Architects series and while it has its distant whiff of Stainless Steel Rat[ß], on the whole the series and its universe have so far remained consistent.

ß: Stainless Steel Rat was notorious for repeatedly putting the protagonist into impossible situations and then whipping up near-magical pieces of technomancy that just happened to solve the problem of the moment.

For me, Children of Ruin had more of a horror focus to it and left me with much more icky feelings than the brilliant positivity I felt at the end of the first book. It was still well done, though.

I agree that Children of Memory is not very good, mostly because it repeats itself so much. That could've been handled differently while still advancing the plot. I LOVE the overall concept, and the author's skills describing Gothi and Gethli's unique kind of intelligence was great, so I was okay with it overall... but too much of it was just a slog. First book is by far the best in my opinion as well.

I always took the Deus Ex Machina in Harrison's books to be just more of the satire. He never really takes his settings or characters lightly, but the presentation is almost always aimed at comedic effect.

> Stainless Steel Rat[ß]

I read this as Stainless Steel Rat[ss], and was befuddled until I read the end of your comment.

I loved Children of Ruin, but Children of Memory did nothing for me.

I was not particularly a fan of them - the plot seemed to find overly easy solutions to all the actual messiness that comes when dealing with others very unlike yourself, which given the rest of the stories, feels like it undercuts the entire point of them.

The Tchaikovsky novella I really like is Elder Race. Technology-as-magic is done in so many places (Ventus is another favourite), and I usually enjoy it, but I felt that in Elder Race it was pulled off in an unusually elegant way.

It'd be (insert noun) and the first one is far and away the best but on the big picture you are absolutely correct that it is fantastic. Children of Time (first one) is maybe my favorite book ever.

Yes Children of Time is very good. Tchaikovsky is excellent at portraying alien/non-human minds. You can tell he studied zoology and psychology at university.

I just get all excited whenever anyone brings these books up, remembering the first time I read them.

Children of Time so very good, it is in the top 5 of my favorite books of all time. I enjoyed the second one as well, and found the third one to be a bit inconsequential and I didn't re-read it when I re-read part 1 and 2.

If you've enjoyed these, give a go for Dogs of War too.

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.

Apart from "Solaris", which many probably know because there's been a reasonably well-known movie, I recommend "Fiasco" by the same author, Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by Stanisław Lem. Spoiler: It does not end well. The aliens are too alien, and the humans do what humans often do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by

I feel this is one of the reasons I liked Fire upon the Deep with the group mind based Tines

Roadside Picnic I believe would also fall into this category. Though the aliens are just theoretical in the book and the characters deal with what is speculated to be the aftermath of an alien visit.

> Roadside Picnic I believe would also fall into this category. Though the aliens are just theoretical in the book and the characters deal with what is speculated to be the aftermath of an alien visit.

Another sci-fi classic sorta made into a movie (Stalker).

In Shroud, Tchaikovsky does very alien (“real” aliens, not “uplifts”) very well. Anthropocentrically, it does not “end well.” Literarily, it vies for my favorite SciFi read of ‘25. Technically, I read “There Is No Antimemetics Division” last year, but I’d already kind of read it... or at least I think I thought I had.

uh uh, uh

Wang’s Carpets usually comes up alongside Solaris as another example of deliberately alien aliens.

I have a spider phobia, and struggled not to put the book down at first!

But the concepts and writing are excellent... really engaging stuff. And by the end of the book I'd learned so much about spiders that I honestly felt less scared of them! Definitely not cured by any means, but a year on and I still fear them less than I used to.

I’ve only read the first one. My main thought was ‘I wish he could write people as well as he could write spiders’ :)

I think humans and spiders and octopus and viruses are for him just a background for the object he wants to narrate. In difference to many other fiction where the persons are the objects. I also missed a human part of it.

If you want more spiders from him (actually, a spider-man), in a fantasy setting, I recommend Spiderlight. Just a fun novella that feels like a D&D campaign, works great as a palate cleanser.

I find his writing style really enjoyable, to the point that I really need to dive into his entire repertoire now.

Unsurprisingly, Tchaikovsky is a tabletop gamer and his first series, Shadows of the Apt, was derived from a game he GMed in college.

And I agree, everything hes written has been worth reading.

I had much the same experience, coming out of it with much less fear about jumping spiders in particular. Now they don't really bother me.

Didn't really do much for all the other species though!

Children of Time sparked more comments from strangers in NYC than anything else I’ve read. I came almost to expect them when reading it.

Alien Clay is also fantastic. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I think it gives the best intuition I’ve seen for a scientific concept that can be difficult to really grok otherwise.

Just finished it, and while I loved the whole plot, the adventurous expeditions away from the base, somehow this one with the waaay too long paragraphs seemed... Unnecessarily boring?

My first Tchaikovsky was children of time and TBH none of the sequels nor his other space operas were as captivating as that one for me.

Yet, I will read this one too. I believe that his ideas and stories are great in books and would never be able to make them into movies. So unique.

The elephant's dad was such a fascinating creature, and the way he described it keening in the distance at night reminded me of the amalgamation creatures from Annihilation. I loved Alien Clay – I hope we get a sequel because the world was so interesting.

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Reach_Series ?

I'm not sure it meets the criteria of "good."

The "aliens" are just spiders. With a lot of magical thinking. It's more like fantasy than science fiction. And character development is terrible. Only one or two are interesting and they get killed too early.

I can take SciFi that's at least either good story or good science. To this day I don't know why people recommend this author so much, even more than Watt's Rifters trilogy or Firefall. He is a "legal executive" who dropped out of zoology/biology. Explanations are just "nanovirus!" or "bioengineering!" and left at that.

Spoiler: the spiders make a space elevator and an asteroid catcher out of spiderweb; really. Stuff like this doesn't pass the suspension of disbelief for me. Reading it was quite annoying.

Feel free to downvote me, but if you do, I ask you the minor kindness to refute my points.

Edit: also "nanovirus!", what? All viruses are nano. And this virus being so complex it can't be too short, either.

This short story is set in the same universe as Tchaikovsky's excellent "Shroud" novel and in fact it's the same ship. I wonder where it sits in the chronology because I think the ending of Shroud surely permits an interesting sequel.

I would think before. This would be one of the vaguely referenced previous places they had found to exploit (in Shroud). I think FenJuan appeared in Shroud as well, with a vague backstory that nevertheless seems consistent with this story.

I am a huge Tchaikovsky fan, mostly as I love his hard sci fi and incredible world building. I normally shy away from any fantasy but his city of last chances trilogy (now turning into a quadrilogy/on its was to 5??) is one of the absurdist Pythonesque and actually funny series I’ve read in years (although the first one is legitimately hard to parse/read given the style). Still, the juice is worth the squeeze and the second in the series I found hilarious.

The Tyrant Philosopher series became (surprisingly) my favorite series from him. There's just something about the way how he depicts colonization and pressure to destroy other cultures and minorities that's oddly compelling.

Hands down one of my favorite series. It's inventive, cynical, wry, dark, and entirely engrossing.

If you enjoy him, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Dogs of War series (1st and 3rd especially).

At some point you start to see his themes recycled across all these series, but it's still fun.

Russian culture should be banned. It's as praying German music during WWII while in England

I really love this series, probably my favorite of his stuff along with Cage of Souls. I got a little bored with the first one but glad I kept on, the second and third were amazing.

I almost like everything he writes which is something because there's a ton of it and it's all over the place. Only ones I've DNFd are the Shards of Earth which is weird because I normally like space opera.

"Stop" isn’t the way of the Concerns. "Stop" doesn’t meet quotas or hit targets.

mmh. very appropriate

The idea of taking ONS to an extreme is cool, and also feels very old-school. The concept of complete monodominance of an ecosphere is a bit unfashionable since Lynn Margulis upended thinking here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontogenetic_niche_shift

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_of_Heorot

You're the first person I've ever encountered who has also read that book. I really enjoyed it.

i just finished Children of Time and found it to be incredibly rewarding. However, I think I prefer Shroud if I were to pick a favorite of Adrian Tchaikovsky. I think he did a very capable job of crystallizing the concept of an alien intelligence that has evolved in a environmental substrate completely foreign to our own. It was very refreshing. If you haven't read this work of his, I highly recommend it.

Chelicerates are an ancient lineage represented best (or, famously) by spiders: chelicerae meaning pincers/fangs.

if you like alien aliens, psychology and biology, Blindsight is your bag. Much darker though.

A similar theme to Adrian Tchaikocsky's most recent standalone work "Alien Clay". I saw on a podcast that he said that in Alien Clay, he started from the reasoning 'What if life developed not with competitive natural selection, but in a maximally cooperative fashion, where every organism is capable of cooperation with any other corporation of organisms', and here is another variant of that theme - or perhaps its opposite, 'What if life was entirely one species'. Very nice.

Also he does love his evil, totalitarian states. Here it's the Concern. In Alien Clay it's the Mandate. I think his name for the philosophy in his Tyrant Philosophers series is very clever: Perfection. The fascist ersatz-Imperial-Britain-copies pursue a doctrine they call Perfection - which is obviously what every monomaniacal totalitarian pursues, the word they'd give to their philosophy is always best translated as Perfection.

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