Readable fantasy/sci-fi hybrid, just like the other two volumes of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory trilogy.
This is a layered, complicated and at times confusing story. It's not without promise, and in it an accommodating reader will find certain thought-provoking ponderings on sentience, on the nature of the self, and on the nature of the real. And if you enjoy magical realism and puzzle-like plots where the reader can't really figure what's going until the end, I'd recommend it. See for example, Susanna Clarke's unusual novel Piranesi, where the reader spends most of the novel in the dark.
Ulimately, however, the book frustrates. When we learn [spoiler incoming!] "it was all a simulation," the lifeblood seems to rush out of all the promising mysterious and psychological elements of the novel, and the reader limps through the last pages, deflated.
If you've read this far and think this novel might interest you, go ahead and read it. If you think it might frustrate or irritate you, then think of this trilogy like the old Matrix movies: just pretend they made only one. And skip the rest of this review!
A few quick additional paragraphs on the story. The reader re-greets many of our characters from books one and two: members of our spider family, our octopus family, our human characters and of course the "goo collective" which is embodied in one of the human characters. In a parallel narrative, we learn about a small human colony on a planet called Imir, also refugees from a long-ago destroyed Earth. This colony is "under observation" by a research team built from peoples of the trilogy's first two novels.
I mentioned above this novel's discussion of sentience and the self. One character, a human who consented to embodying the goo collective, has multiple "selves" by design and struggles to organize who she literally is. Imagine method acting all the time, like some multi-personaed Marlon Brando. Other characters help the reader think through the nature of sentience, and for this thematic purpose our author introduces us to another new species, the Corvids, who are extraordinarily intelligent crows who operate in pairs. One notes changes in an environment, the other puzzles out what those changes mean. Combined, they have a sort of sentience--sort of--which sets up another intriguing philosophical component of the novel.
The author works in psychological and folkloric elements as well. The human colony appears to operate under a tremendous guilt burden, which the reader discovers gradually. Our key protagonist from this colony, Liff, plays a sort of "Goldilocks in the dark forest" role in a setting that could right come out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story (Eréndira comes to mind).
[More spoilers incoming] The research team, while living embedded with the human colony, has to grapple with a sort of Star Trek "prime directive" problem: to what extent should they interfere with this colony to save it, especially when it becomes obvious that it cannot survive?
Unfortunately, what frustrates (honestly, irritates) the reader is just as we begin to care about this colony, we're told they never really lived at all. They "survive" now only as an iterative, recorded simulation running on some ancient device buried in the planet's crust. Think of this device as the novel's Macguffin, oiling up the story to make it work. Unfortunately, there is so much expository required to explain this device, how it worked, and then re-explain to the reader what actually has been happening all along that the story loses its weight and force.
Notes:
* Our protagonists arrive at a planet that is habitable, but not habitable enough to sustain a colony permanently. As the enter the atmosphere, they pick up a curious signal emanating from the planet's surface. This turns out to be, retrospectively, a sort of partial clue for the reader but there's no way to know it at this point in the narrative.
* We meet Liff, she gets lost in the woods and meets two beings: Gethli and Gothi, the Corvids.
* Portia reappears, also Fabian, Bianca, Paul the Octopus and Jodry a human. Also Avrana Kern, the AI program.
* The humans on Imir have regressed, they are losing their technology, they are close-minded and xenophobic, the planet is kind of like a 1990s-era Cuba with re-re-re-renovated vehicles and tractors, etc., as this culture tries to hang on to technology they can no longer produce from scratch.
* The reader now can figure out at this point that the Imir planet family of Miranda, Paul, Portia and Fabian have somehow taken human form and are embedded within the Imir colony, observing their collapse.
* "We're looking for something that's become lost."
"What is it?"
"A survey team."
[Again, clues here as to what's going on]
* The survey team is seized and hanged by the townspeople.
* Backstory on the Corvids/birds and their development on the planet Rourke, with chemistry that caused toxic buildup, cancers, birth defects, etc., in all animals: only corvids and ants seemed to make it there. The corvids form cognitive pairs, one sees before/after differences, the other is a sort of an unself-aware problem-solver. The reader now gets explanations for the weird behavior of the corvid characters Gethli and Gothi, sort of the novel's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They have a predilection for dropping literary quotes from Virginia Woolf, Tennyson, etc.
* The time horizon of the story changes, and now we're back to the first couple of generations of this planet; how they had to leave many of the crew in stasis up in orbit, they couldn't bring everybody down; this meant leaving them to die as the ship in orbit gradually lost power. The Liff character is suddenly way beyond her years here, it's not quite believable.
* "Listen, I don't precisely know why it's you I need to have this conversation with, but the birds have you in their sight, and that means I can come to you without introducing more chaos into the system." Here the reader can figure out "the Witch" is Avrana Kern, and we get another clue as to what's going on. The witch/fairytale/crows paradigm is an interesting vehicle to tell this part of the story. Liff brings Miranda to the Witch: "Who is this girl, and why is she important?" The reader still doesn't really know what's going on yet. Nor do the characters themselves.
* There's a famine, the initial colony setup wasn't stable although it took many generations to play out. "We came just in time to record their last days." Liff and the survey team feel like they live multiple realities, maybe at the same time, but it turns out that the colony died out, but was preserved as a simulation by some alien computer buried in the planet's crust. A weird story element. Does it work? Extensive, extensive expository required here to bring the reader up to speed.
* Yes the colony died out; Liff is the last, she starves; the simulation re-runs it over and over again. But then this machine played a simulation including Miranda (sort of an observer effect, kind of meta). This machine is the mother of all Macguffins: an arbitrary item or device that needs to be added so that the story can actually be possible. [Also note this tungsten-coated sentence describing it: "It's a relic of a civilization that strode the stars long before humanity ever reached orbit." That should not have survived editing.]
* The character Miranda spends quite a lot of narrative trying to grapple with what the hell just happened to her, what happened to fracture her being, her self. Nobody seems to want to talk to her about it, they're more curious about the simulation itself: its fidelity, what the technology teaches them, etc.
* Philosophical thoughts about comparing a simulation with the real when you can't tell the difference; also learning that you were within a simulated environment but you couldn't tell at all; was that real? Is it still real?
* In a discussion on the nature of sentience, the Corvids Gothi and Gethli drop a verbal nuke on everybody else: "You'd think we think, but we have thought about the subject and come to the considered conclusion that we do not think. All that passes between us and within us is just mechanical complexity."
* The humans in this story would rather project sentience on things that appear sentient but aren't. Further, that sentience itself may only be an illusion of a self-proclaimed sentient: this illusion is just manufactured by sufficient complexity in the neural system, the brain. Thus sentience itself may just be a simulation!
* Kind of funny that the Corvids choose the epistemically humble (or is it the lazy?) route and decide they are not sentient. "We think that it is better not to be sentient. Imagine how hard that would be, to actually have to think about things all the time."
* Also on deciding on the importance of events that were or appeared perfectly "real" but turn out to be simulations in retrospect: one way to handle this is to say that "it's not important: it doesn't matter whether the here and now (or the then) is a simulation--if it's indistinguishable then it doesn't matter." Just like sentience: if sentience is indistinguishable from the illusion of sentience then it doesn't matter, just call it sentience.
* Also note this intriguing comment from the Corvids that really shakes everyone out of their solipsism: "Imagine how it feels for the simulation." We'll soon see the relevance of this quote.
* The reader now learns this simulation/reality problem has yet another layer, and it's much worse: the simulation isn't even of anything that was real. The shuttle the original colonists managed to get off the mothership never survived atmospheric entry. All there was of the colony was a crash site: no one ever lived at all. [I think what might be quite frustrating to a reader right now is to learn after 300 pages of reading, about half of this book never existed in the first place.] Note here the reader is treated to another leaden sentence about the Macguffin/simulation machine that should never have survived editing: "But when the shuttle systems failed, and Holt and the others fell from the sky, invisible hands were spread to catch them."
* Miranda advocates for going back into the simulation itself and rescuing some of the simulation beings [now the reader is asked to consider the possible sentience of a "being" that exists inside a simulation]; the "original Miranda" comes to meet "simulated Miranda" in the simulation; they have sort of a mother-daughter conversation ("I'm proud of you/you've accomplished something great/so brave" etc.); Miranda goes back into the simulation with the AI/Avrana Kern character to visit Liff, but this time she goes in with "moderator privileges" so we get a meta-Macguffin on top of the original Macguffin. The book ends with Liff reaching out to the potential sentience of the simulation itself.
To Read:
Jennifer Ackerman: The Genius of Birds
Bernd Heinrich: Mind of the Raven
Vocab [Again, props to this novelist for teaching me a bunch of new words]:
Gallimaufry: a confused jumble or medley of things; "a glorious gallimaufry of childhood perceptions";
also: a dish made from diced or minced meat, especially a hash or ragout
Pareidolia: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern; the human ability to see shapes or make pictures out of randomness
Louring: (also lowering): to look sullen, to frown; to be or become dark, gloomy, and threatening "an overcast sky lowered over the village"
Saprophyte: a plant, fungus, or microorganism that lives on dead or decaying organic matter
Imago: in entomology: the final and fully developed adult stage of an insect, typically winged; in psychoanalysis: an unconscious idealized mental image of someone, especially a parent, which influences a person's behavior
Benthic: of, relating to, or occurring at the bottom of the depths of the ocean. The "benthic zone" is the ecological region at the lowest level of a body of water such as an ocean, lake, or stream, including the sediment surface and some sub-surface layers
Myxomatosized: having myxomatosis, or symptoms of myxomatosis, a severe viral infection affecting rabbits
Gnomic: adjectival form of "gnomes"; something written in short, pithy maxims or aphorisms
Disaster taxon: A pioneer organism, plural "disaster taxa"; is an organism that colonizes a previously empty area first, or one that repopulates vacant niches after a natural disaster, mass extinction or any other catastrophic event that wipes out most life of the prior biome
Cenotaph: a monument to someone buried elsewhere, especially one commemorating people who died in a war. From the Greek words for empty tomb
Strandline: a high water mark; shoreline, especially a shoreline above the present water level
Genius loci: In classical Roman religion, a genius loci was the protective spirit of a place. It was often depicted in religious iconography as a figure holding attributes such as a cornucopia, patera (libation bowl), or snake