Book review: Children of Memory, Adrian Tchaikovsky.

This is a book that would certainly fit into the category of “epic” sci-fi, spanning as it does vast intergalactic distances, countless millennia, and various intriguing alien races. But the story it tells is fundamentally human. The focus of the book revolves around the human colony on the far-off planet of Imir, as observed by a crew of highly intelligent aliens with far superior technology, and a young girl, Liff, on the planet itself. As the humans’ last-ditch hope after fleeing a dying earth, life on Imir is hard. We are treated to glimpses of the founding days of the colony and the tough decisions made by the founders.

The story introduces us to different depictions of intelligence and invites us to ponder what it really means to be sentient. Of these I found the corvids the most fascinating: highly capable birds who can only make sense of the world as a complementary pair, their “intelligence” only existing as something shared between the two of them. The question of their sentience is one that is never truly resolved, and also preoccupies their fellow crew members.

As the story unravels, we learn about the problems that befall the nascent colony. Despite huge leaps in technology and the great adversities overcome, human nature remains fundamentally the same as it ever was. As the colony’s struggles become apparent, we see its inhabitants grow ever more inward-looking and distrustful of outsiders. The fragmenting of reality that follows could be read as symbolic of the fractured reality that we now live in thanks to today’s technology and hypercapitalism, where we can never be quite sure what the “truth” is.

Although on the face of it Tchaikovsky depicts artificial intelligence as equal in complexity to human (or indeed other alien species’) intelligence, in this case the “AI” is in fact a former human whose brain and experience has been digitised. We also encounter another, more sinister type of intelligence, one that is made up of the collective experiences of all of those it has consumed. Again, there are some parallels with what is happening today. I don’t think of this as a “pro AI” novel, but one that invites us to consider the age-old questions of whether machines can truly be intelligent, and what we mean by intelligence at all.

Despite Miranda’s entreaties to help the people of Imir, we cannot but wonder if the “help” on offer would in fact be tantamount to the colony’s destruction. This is the sort of philosophical sci-fi I’m here for.