Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky came out recently. It's the latest in his Children of Time series. There's a lot I could say about this book, with its deconstruction of the glorious warrior culture, the deconstruction of the techbro "move fast and break things" culture, and the fact that their entire society is built on the foundation of an AI helper who is basically your grouchy, racist grandma.
As great as all that is, though, what I want to focus on right now is comparing it to another series, The Three Body Problem.
The Three Body Problem has, as its central thesis, that communicating between different cultures is extremely difficult, and due to the vast distances of space, that means communicating between different species is basically impossible. Inevitably, someone will throw an asteroid at a planet to exterminate the annoying new species. That means the only logical policy is to remain completely quiet, and instantly kill anyone nearby who might do the same to you. This is referred to as the "Dark Forest hypothesis;" every species is a primitive hunter stalking through a dark forest, hoping no one notices them.
Children of Time almost feels like a direct refutation to that series. The first book begins with human civilization falling due to their own short-sighted refusal to get along, with the losers of the war on Earth using their last breath to send a virus that bricks every piece of technology in the galaxy. Their legacy is a poisoned Earth and a single terraformed planet, upon which a nanovirus begins granting intelligence to a species of spiders. Thousands of years later, the descendants of Earth come to the planet looking for a new home, and find that the spiders have formed a civilization of their own. It's kill or be killed, two primitive hunters sizing each other up in a competition for limited resources.
And then they make an alliance. Because despite the Dark Forest hypothesis, despite all the difficulties the spiders and humans have in even recognizing each other's speech, they ultimately realize that diversity is strength, and they can do more together than they can do alone.
In the second book, Children of Ruin, a spider/human ship comes upon another terraformed world. A world of intelligent octopuses have had their civilization ruined by a truly alien organism, a self-replicating microbial entity that acts somewhere between a plague and a forest fire. The octopuses are all insane artists who also happen to be savants with machinery, and the intruders are about the break a quarantine that could kill them all. It almost breaks down into war, and the alien virus breaks out.
Except then they make an alliance. Not just with the octopuses, but also with the alien virus. Because they sit down, figure out what it actually wants, and convince it to work with them instead of against them.
Over and over in this series, the heroes are confronted with situations where communication is impossible, peace is a naive dream, and they would be fully justified in just nuking the enemy and going on with their day. And over and over, they don't. They have the power to wipe out their enemies, but doing something so short-sighted and wasteful is antithetical to their culture. The universe is vast, and there's always enough for everyone.
The Three Body Problem always depressed me deeply. It seems like a very cynical work, almost like the author doesn't believe in peace and mutual cooperation as a real concept. Children of Time and its sequels always uplift me, making me feel like everyone really can make it if we just try. It won't be easy, and there are definitely always going to be some greedy or just scared idiots screwing things up, but it's possible to succeed regardless. And not by something horrible like "kill all the people who disagree with us;" of course not, that would defeat the point. Simply by making sure that the angry, greedy children don't have the tools to break things for everyone else.
This was a bit of a ramble, but no one is talking about the themes of this beautiful series, so I had to say it.
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