★★★☆☆ What is it like to be an octopus?

Children of Ruin

Adrian Tchaikovsky

There is a famous essay called What is it like to be a Bat? / Wie ist es, eine Fledermaus zu sein? by philosopher Thomas Nagel. (Although I am not a philosopher, I am a neuroscientist, and as a neuroscientist it is almost impossible to avoid knowing a little of the nonsense philosophers think about how minds work.) Nagel attempts to make an argument about consciousness. He argues that the consciousness of a bat is an experience a human cannot possibly have or understand, because echolocation is so unhuman.

I have a little fantasy about Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series. I imagine he read Nagel's effusion and said to himself, "Utter nonsense! I'm gonna show that I can imagine not only what it's like to be a bat, but even what it's like to be a spider or an octopus!" (Nagel in fact raises the question of invertebrate experience in his essay, only to make the point that it is an even harder problem than bat consciousness.) I don't know whether this is true. However, I would be willing to bet that Tchaikovsky has read Nagel's essay, and is familiar with the literature of Philosophy of Mind. For instance, technical terms from that field show up in Children of Ruin.

I would describe Tchaikovsky as a "hard science fiction author". So far I have read only two of his novels, but they are clearly based in science. This doesn't mean the science is always right or in accord with what scientists now believe (it is, after all, speculative fiction and science fiction), but that when he departs from science he does so knowingly, and with more justification than Star Trek-style technobabble.

Tchaikovsky's plot based on the attempt to imagine himself into spider brains worked very well, in my opinion, in Children of Time. I fell in love with the Portias, Fabians, and Bianca's of spider history on Kern's planet and found their history engrossing. It worked less well for me in Children of Ruin. It is not so much that he succeeded less well with the octopuses. I think that is true. (I loved the Pauls and Ruths less than the Portias and Fabians.) But it is a minor problem. The bigger problem is that he let the technical stuff take over too much. It became more textbook-like than story-like. I didn't believe in the weird alien memory bacteria he invented and had a hard time caring a lot about them.

Still I intend to go on and read Children of Memory. Any review that says, "I'm gonna keep on reading this guy!" counts as a positive review!

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