[HN Gopher] Sins of the Children (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
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Sins of the Children (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
Author : maxall4
Score : 81 points
Date : 2026-01-18 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| iroddis wrote:
| 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.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| 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.
| cududa wrote:
| I just get all excited whenever anyone brings these books up,
| remembering the first time I read them.
| danielbln wrote:
| 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.
| aduwah wrote:
| If you've enjoyed these, give a go for Dogs of War too.
| james-bcn wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| 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.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| 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.
| kmarc wrote:
| 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.
| lelandfe wrote:
| _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.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _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 Stanislaw 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)
| thom wrote:
| Wang's Carpets usually comes up alongside Solaris as another
| example of deliberately alien aliens.
| bear8642 wrote:
| > 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
| nemosaltat wrote:
| 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
| GordonS wrote:
| 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.
| Angostura wrote:
| I've only read the first one. My main thought was 'I wish he
| could write people as well as he could write spiders' :)
| oaiey wrote:
| 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.
| sph wrote:
| 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.
| Xiol wrote:
| 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!
| bostik wrote:
| 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.
| jives wrote:
| I loved Children of Ruin, but Children of Memory did nothing
| for me.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| 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.
| alecco wrote:
| 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.
| komadori wrote:
| 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.
| jmull wrote:
| 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.
| robbiep wrote:
| 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.
| netghost wrote:
| 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.
| izacus wrote:
| 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.
| sidibe wrote:
| 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.
| mrybczyn wrote:
| if you like alien aliens, psychology and biology, Blindsight is
| your bag. Much darker though.
| booleanbetrayal wrote:
| 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.
| arjie wrote:
| 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.
| shervinafshar wrote:
| > 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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).
| bradrn wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| > 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
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _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
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| _" Stop" isn't the way of the Concerns. "Stop" doesn't meet
| quotas or hit targets._
|
| mmh. very appropriate
| alasdairking wrote:
| Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_of_Heorot
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