CBR Bingo: Culture (this book features first contact between different cultures, and touches on the thematic philosophical question of if destroying a culture is worth it if it means saving the people of that culture).
This is the third book in the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I have just flown through them all in the past few days. I loved the first two books in the series, so I wanted to start this one almost immediately after finishing Children of Ruin.
Much like the previous two books, we get some opposing viewpoints from different factions, and along a variety of different timelines. This is mostly set on the world of Imir, a harsh world that is a couple of generations removed from a desperate colonization mission from Earth. Our main viewpoint is a girl (technically she’s twenty-six, but the years are a lot shorter so she’s our equivalent of a young teenager) named Liff who was born and raised on Imir. There’s also a team of scientists from a more technologically advanced culture who have detected a signal from the planet and have gone to investigate.
The narrative in this one was kind of trippy, and I was frequently confused (but in a good way). There’s a general sense of something not being right throughout the book, some of which is telegraphed in a more obvious ways than others, and it was interesting to try to put the pieces together. Whenever I thought I knew what was going on, there was another new piece of information that made me reevaluate.
While I didn’t like this one as much as Children of Time, I did like it better than Children of Ruin, as I was able to connect with the characters a lot more. A race of maybe-sentient giant corvids is introduced in this book, and the pair that accompany the investigation team were fascinating to read about.