Children of Memory (novel)

Children of Memory is a 2023 science fiction novel by author Adrian Tchaikovsky. The novel follows the development of a mysterious colony on a hostile exoplanet, while the human civilization from the previous books encounters a society of intelligent corvids.

The story is told through a nonlinear narrative. The book starts out by following the colony on Imir through the viewpoint of a human girl named Liff. She has many memories of her "grandfather" (this culture has a different system of declaring age) despite him being from multiple generations before Liff's birth. She meets different members of a group of explorers. Miranda, the leader of these explorers, is an interlocutor from Nod, introduced in Children of Ruin. Miranda has integrated into the colony taking the guise of a teacher. She has taken a liking to Liff, as Liff has to her. The colony begins experiencing anomalies and strange phenomena. After multiple different glitches and resets including Miranda dying, the group communes with their head AI, Dr. Kern, who has taken the form of a witch. They realize that they're not living in reality, but in a simulation. Miranda and the group are reformed aboard a ship in new bodies, taken out of the reality that has proved to be a simulation by some sort of machine. It is revealed that Liff's "grandfather" never landed with his crew; they crashed their spaceship while attempting to land. The machine is simply simulating everything over and over. The machine's simulation had reached stability until Miranda and her crew arrived, leading to the glitches. Miranda has some discussions with the newly recruited corvids and discovers they believe that they are not sentient. Miranda is conflicted: anything with sufficient complexity develops sentience, and a machine that can simulate a world must be complex enough to be sentient. She struggles with the decision: should they extract the simulated beings from the simulation? Would that affect the machine? Ultimately she decides the simulated people should make the choice. She extracts Liff. Liff does not choose to save her people. She goes back into the simulation and reaches out, not to the rest of the crew or to her people, but to the machine itself, and it reaches back.

The novel is a sequel to Children of Time and Children of Ruin. In 2023, the series was awarded^[a] the Hugo Award for Best Series.

• Children of Memory title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Children of Time series Archived from the original on Adrian Tchaikovsky official website