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Comment by iroddis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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