Children of Memory
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Background
Series Context: The Children of Time Series
Children of Memory is the third installment in the Children of Time series, a sci-fi series that explores themes of evolution, consciousness, and interspecies communication on a galactic scale. The first novel, Children of Time (2015), establishes the premise of “uplift,” a process of accelerated evolution via a nanovirus developed by the scientist Dr. Avrana Kern. On a terraformed planet called Kern’s World, this virus transforms common jumping spiders into a technologically advanced, sentient species known as the Portiids. Generations later, the last human survivors from a ruined Earth arrive on an ark ship, the Gilgamesh. Initial conflict gives way to coexistence when the humans are also uplifted, allowing them to recognize the spiders as equals and form a hybrid Human-Portiid society.
The sequel, Children of Ruin, expands the universe to a neighboring system. Here, terraformers uplifted octopuses on the water world of Damascus in a similar manner to the uplift of the spiders on Kern’s world. Human colonists searching for a new place to live (after Earth is rendered uninhabitable) visit Damascus and the nearby planet Nod, where they encounter a native, cell-based hive intelligence that resembles a parasite. This Nodan organism learns by absorbing other life forms, a process that almost leads to the tragic destruction of the octopus civilization. Eventually, an agreement is found between the Nodan organism, the octopuses, and the human and portiid crew members, allowing them to venture out into the rest of the universe in search of other life.
Children of Memory begins in the aftermath of these events, with a tentative alliance formed between the Human-Portiid society, the space-faring Octopus survivors, and a reformed Nodan entity. This multispecies coalition travels the stars in ships like the Skipper, seeking other remnants of humanity and new forms of life, which brings them to the mysterious world of Imir.
Authorial Context: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Zoological Background
Author Adrian Tchaikovsky’s academic background in zoology and psychology at the University of Reading deeply informs the novel’s speculative biology. Rather than inventing fantastical aliens, Tchaikovsky grounds his creations in established principles of evolution and ecology, thanks in large part to many of the alien species deriving from original earth-based species that have undergone dramatic biological reconstruction and eons of evolution.
This scientific rigor is evident in the development of the Corvids on Rourke. In the real world, corvids (the family of birds including crows and ravens) are renowned for their intelligence. New Caledonian crows, for example, are famous for their sophisticated tool use, as documented in a 2002 Science study showing they can make and use two different types of tool for extracting prey from crevices (Hunt, Gavin R. “Tool Manufacture by New Caledonian Crows.” Nature, 18 Jan. 1996). Tchaikovsky extrapolates from this known cognitive prowess to imagine the Corvids’ evolution into a species capable of mimicking and reverse-engineering advanced technology.
Similarly, the collapse of the human colony on Imir is a detailed case study in ecological fragility. The colonists establish an ecosystem with perilously low biodiversity, creating a system that mirrors the vulnerabilities of real-world monoculture agriculture. The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, for instance, was caused by an entire nation’s reliance on a single potato variety that had no resistance to a new blight. Likewise, the Imiri colony’s simple, engineered food web is a “rickety scaffolding” (58) that inevitably collapses once a single bacterial or insect species mutates, demonstrating a realistic ecological cascade.
Philosophical Context: Simulation Theory and the Turing Test
Children of Memory directly engages with long-standing philosophical questions about reality and consciousness, particularly the simulation hypothesis and the Turing Test. The simulation hypothesis, articulated by philosopher Nick Bostrom, posits that our perceived reality may be an artificial simulation. In his 2003 paper, Bostrom argues that it is highly probable that “we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation” if advanced civilizations are capable of creating them (Bostrom, Nick. “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 211, 2003, pp. 243-55).
The novel literalizes this concept with the discovery of an alien “engine buried perhaps two kilometers in the earth, near the location of the Landfall colony” (401), which has been running a detailed simulation of the entire colony’s history. The protagonist Miranda becomes trapped within this simulation, forcing her to confront a reality where her life and the lives of everyone she knew “never was” (456).
Complementing this is the novel’s exploration of the Turing Test, a measure of artificial intelligence proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. The test assesses whether a machine can exhibit conversational behavior indistinguishable from a human’s. The Corvids of Rourke present a living embodiment of this test’s ambiguity. Avrana Kern suspects they are merely a “biological Eliza” (106), a reference to a 1960s chatbot that mimicked conversation without understanding it. The Corvids themselves deny their own sentience, claiming to be complex machines that only appear to think, forcing readers to question the line between sophisticated mimicry and genuine consciousness.
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By Adrian Tchaikovsky
