This book brings us the story of the generation of Humans and spiders after the 'Children of Time', and that of another expedition from the time of the first terraforming of Kern's world. In the previous book Tchaikovsky gave us two different, non-human intelligences: the spiders and the ants. In this book he gives us two more, even more alien than we have met before. The differences between these minds and those of humans, and the ways in which they evolved, were fascinating. There was also much coverage of how the different species managed to communicate, one of my favorite topics.
The spiders and Humans of Kern's world have made their first interstellar spacecraft. This is still a sub-light-speed craft, with the crew going into cold-sleep during the long period between stars. When they arrive in a new system, they find it inhabited by both native lifeforms and some, non-human, descendants of the human terraforming mission. There is conflict amongst the descendants of Earth, and we join them at a critical point in their society's history. This allows the crew from Kern's world to interact with different factions, and with the life which did not originate on Earth.
The timing of the expedition's arrival is very convenient for the story, but I suppose it was necessary for the plot. The fact that they happen to come across a damaged craft, being flung out of the system, just as they arrive, given the huge area it could have emerged from, and the precise timing, did seem rather contrived. There were other coincidences or convenient timings, but on the whole you could see the necessity of these to the plot. They were the main issue I would take with the book. They did work to get the ideas across, but, given the time spans covered by the first book, this could, perhaps have been done differently. The existential threats to the Human and Portiid races did not seem as great, or as imminent as in the first book, so the compressed time frame probably also served to heighten the tension of the narrative.
I thought the first book was slightly better, but it was a hard act to follow, and this one had all the ideas, the excellent writing, interesting characters and character development you could wish for. Even the AI remnants fo Avrana Kern, got to have some personal development, which was an
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Develin
Not as good or transcendent as Children of Time
Reviewed in Spain on 2 July 2022