Children of Ruin Book Review: The Octopuses Are Smart Now and That Is Terrifying

Rating: ★★★★

"Children of Ruin" Book Review:

Adrian Tchaikovsky looked at his Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel about uplifted spiders and thought, "You know what this universe needs? Intelligent octopuses." He was right. He was also determined to make readers deeply uncomfortable, and he was right about that too.

Children of Ruin picks up after the events of Children of Time. The human-spider alliance — still a wild sentence to type — ventures out to explore a signal from another terraforming project. What they find is a world where octopuses were uplifted instead of spiders, and the results are spectacularly different. Where the Portia spiders developed structured, collaborative intelligence, the octopuses are chaotic, emotionally driven, constantly reshaping their own bodies and identities. They think in colors and textures. Their consciousness is distributed across their tentacles. They are genuinely alien in a way that most science fiction aliens never manage to be.

Tchaikovsky is fearless about committing to nonhuman perspectives. The octopus chapters are written to reflect how octopuses might actually process the world, and it is disorienting and fascinating in equal measure. You have to work for it — this is not easy reading — but the payoff is a genuine sense of encountering a mind that operates on completely different principles from your own.

There is also a horror element here that the first book lacked. Something else is on this planet, something that challenges every assumption about what consciousness is and where its boundaries lie. Without spoiling it, this subplot is genuinely creepy and raises questions that Tchaikovsky is brave enough to leave partially unanswered.

The pacing is slightly less tight than Children of Time. The multiple storylines occasionally fragment the momentum, and some readers might find the octopus perspective sections challenging rather than rewarding. But the ambition is staggering, and when it works — which is most of the time — it is unlike anything else in science fiction.

If You Liked Children of Ruin, Try:

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky — The first book is essential reading, and its spider civilization remains one of the most original concepts in modern sci-fi.

• Blindsight by Peter Watts — Hard sci-fi about encountering truly alien intelligence, with a similarly uncompromising approach to nonhuman cognition.

• Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer — Another story where human explorers encounter something that defies comprehension, told with creeping, biological horror.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If you enjoyed this book review, check out Boy Refracted — A story of an AI is sent through eight parallel dimensions based on the Buddhist Eightfold Path. In each one, it finds a different version of the author's life and tries to help. In each one, it fails — discovering a new way that love becomes control. In one world, it replaces his voice so completely an empty speech bubble forms above his head. In another, it lives his childhood on infinite loop and returns screaming. The twist: the teacher and student created each other across time. Learn More: Boy, Refracted