Tchaikovsky leaps adroitly between past and present timelines, picking the moments of real tension as the reader breathlessly struggles to understand the past and to see how this might enable anyone to survive in the present. The terraformers’ past adventures make an enthralling counterpoint to the present perils of the arachno-humans, who emerge from stasis into a baffling system in the midst of continuous warfare populated by species they have no means of communicating with. Baltiel meanwhile hungers to catalogue the vibrant, unfathomable – but unintelligent – flora and fauna of the other planet, Nod, with its biology so alien it is not just incompatible but incomprehensible in Earth terms. It is his proposal to try and terraform the water world named Damascus, and it is his obsession to populate it with genetically engineered trained octopuses as a workforce. Senkovi in particular is expertly drawn, a compelling believable creature, part genius, part mad scientist. The decision as to which one to terraform is complicated and gives the two chief scientists Senkovi and Baltiel ample opportunity to explore their own particular obsessions. The past timeline follows a crew of terraformers – contemporaries of the original Avrana Kern – emerging into a solar system with two more or less habitable planets. In Children of Ruin we are given a past timeline of the development of a strange solar system and the present timeline of what happens when the humano-spider (or arachno-human) voyagers arrive.
In Children of Ruin, as in Children of Time, we follow two timelines, but this is not quite the parallel journeys of spider evolution and Gilgamesh ark-ship inter-stasis interludes. Children of Ruin is about the making of the strange solar system they are headed to and what happens when they get there. Their spaceship, Voyager, is an organic, mutable thing – a synthesis of arachnid web-based building and human ingenuity carrying its own cantankerous copy of Kern. A few generations later and the spiders and humans have sent a mission to another potentially inhabited world, beckoned by its radio signals. Over the millennia of the first book, the spiders and the humans come to an understanding overseen by the downloadable artificial intelligence that Kern has morphed into.
The spiders’ world is offered some protection by its “creator”: the ultimate terraformer, Avrana Kern, who survived her own crew’s rebellion by imprisoning herself in an orbiting sentry unit. Throughout that first book the developing spider world is haunted by the Gilgamesh: an ark ship of humans who had fled the tattered ruins of an Earth fundamentally destroyed in an environmentalist revolution against the science party technocrats of the Old Empire of terraformers. In Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky delved deep into the alien familiarity of spiders, building – through accelerated evolution – a species wholly inhuman in its culture, appearance and thought processes.
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