Children of Memory is the final leg of the trilogy, but don’t let that dissuade you from grabbing it. This science fiction posits a universe with terraformed worlds out there, a failing earth, and arks of civilization journeying to establish colonies on the terraformed worlds. One such ark reaches its destination but the survivors feel guilt because the colony was never able to support more than a handful and there are thousands still in orbit waiting to be unfrozen. Those that made it seemingly have a tough hardscrabble agrarian life. But there are other evolved species out there filled with curiosity who are watching the colony develop and are hidden in plain sight despite a real existence as octopuses and spiders and the like. There’s also a colonist girl Laff who sees her grandfather’s ghost and chases it into the woods some 200 years after the shuttle landing.
The trick that Tchaikovsky plays is that the real story is not the colonists, but the alien brings watching them. And it is through them that he brings us to philosophical questions about what it means to be sentient and what it means to be real rather than artificial.
There are points where the story is quite confusing as the threads begin to separate, but hang in there. It will all come together in the end and make you think and wonder.
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