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Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth was also reviewed here a while back. The two books are surprisingly different.
In the distant future a crew of spacefarers visit a colony established on a distant world long before their civilization came to be. This colony represents an earlier, more primitive strain of humanity, separated from our spacefarers by millennia of unrest, exploration and evolution. After one of the crew descends to the surface of the planet, events quickly spiral out of their control, and as they race to uncover a still more ancient mystery they find themselves increasingly embroiled in both colonial politics and the planet's troubled ecology.
Children of Memory is a flawlessly written book. I admire Tchaikovsky's way with words. He paces the whole thing to perfection, holding back on certain details until just the right moments. He's a masterful storyteller, and this is not the kind of praise I give out often.
This said, there are a lot of "smart dumb books" in the science fiction genre, and this might be yet another example. It's hard to discuss the ending of this novel without giving too much away, but let's just say that the book's conclusion hinges upon an artifact left behind by an earlier, non-human civilization, and the way in which the spacefarers are able to manipulate this technology seems implausible. This aspect of the novel reminded me a lot of the movie Independence Day, in which Earth scientists somehow manage to hack a massive alien spaceship with whatever version of Windows they were using at the time.
The more linguistic/existential parts of this novel are great, however. I just wish that the twist at the end hadn't been so disappointing. It's the kind of story that makes a great deal of emotional, if not logical sense. The future technologies at play in the book are never discussed or explored in any detail, leaving the whole thing feeling somewhat hollow in parts. Even so, from the vantage point of the little girl at the center of the story this novel is still satisfying, even in the presence of its technical shortcomings.
I'd give this one a slightly higher grade than Shards of Earth. I have issues with both books, but Children of Memory is much more involving.
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