Children of Memory (Children of Time #3) by
October 2025
First off, I wish every techbro who goes on about colonizing other planets would first read this book and also Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson and then have a little think about the realities of doing such an outlandish thing.
This marvelous book is ostensibly about humans colonizing other planets, but like every Adrian Tchaikovsky book I’ve ever read, it’s really about much bigger and weighter things: the nature of consciousness, of sentience, of “personhood”, of reality itself. It’s about what it means to think and feel, what it means to exist at all.
It’s the sad story of a struggling human colony on a distant planet and the people who eke out an increasingly difficult existence there. I found this aspect of the narrative interesting enough on its own, but as the story continues and takes unexpected paths, it becomes more and more engaging and thought-provoking, as well as very moving. It’s another book that I stayed up late to finish, because as the threads came together towards the end, I found it impossible to put down. It’s also impossible to really talk about without spoilers (see below), so you’ll have to read it for yourself!
Spoilers!
As it became increasingly clear that something very strange was going on in the colony, I started keeping a mental list of the potential explanations for it: time loop, simulation, parallel universes, something weird with the hibernation pods, etc. When the first reveal comes—it’s a simulation!—I thought, okay, yeah, that was on my list. I wasn’t surprised by it, though I was caught off guard by how sad the story became then. The description of the starving Liff asking Miranda and Kern for help, and Kern dismissing it as something that happened a long time ago—oof. But then when the second reveal comes—it’s a simulation of something that never even happened!—I was floored. I absolutely did not expect that one-two punch, and I’m very glad that the narrative ended up looping around again to a somewhat more hopeful end, because if it had just ended like that, I would have been wrecked.