Children of Ruin

Children of Ruin doubles everything good about the first book and drops all of the stuff I didn’t like. A scientific expedition of Portiids and Humans has arrived at a star that has been broadcasting radio waves to find two new sentiences and all the hazards that encompass.

The easiest ones are uplifted octopodes, descendants of another Old Empire terraforming expedition. The octopodes have a truly bizarre cognitive framework, bifurcated between the emotional “I” of the Crown and the rational yet unspeaking tentacular Reach. Their creator left them high technology, enough to kickstart an undersea industrial base and space-faring capabilities, yet their civilization has been gripped by decades of fraught resource wars driven by overpopulation that their fluid and protean political system is unable to grapple with.

At least the Octopodes are neural, Earth-descended. The other mind is the Nodians, some kind of nano-parasite that acts as an aggressively hegemonizing mindjacking swarm. With the terrifying refrain “We are going on an adventure!”, Nod infected entities are deadly threats to Octopodes, as well as any humans and spiders they might encounter. It’s up to a small group of Portiids, Humans, and an Avrala Kern fragment to navigate a deadly flux of mistranslation to find common ground and common peace. Children of Ruin is a great work of modern space opera!