I thought the second and third books were also great, but different flavours, he didn’t just repeat.

The second goes for more of a horror angle and has some incredible moments. The third is one of the most ambitious books SF novels I’ve read. Blurry and confusing on purpose, which is a fine line to tread (reminiscent of the latter Jeff Vandermeer Southern Reach books).

Recently went to a book reading and Q&A for his new one Shroud, really smart and humble chap. Deeply into his research.

Also, notably, he wrote a book a year for 17 (one seven) years before being published. And then it took 12? more novel before he had a hit with Children Of Time. He didn’t seem to have a shred of resentment about that which felt remarkable and and incredible example of perseverance and enjoyment of process over result.

A fourth Children Of book is imminent.

My exchange with another commenter in this thread led me to reconsider the Children of Time series, and I'm now inclined to agree with you, putting the second and third books, books, particularly the third, ahead of the first. (And as I said elsewhere in the thread, I'm really impressed, and delighted, by the quality of the responses people have offered to my offhand comments).

"Because we're going on an adventure." Funny, it hadn't occurred to me to think of the second book as horror, but you're right.

I had no idea Tschaikovsky's career arc was so grueling. I agree that he seems incredibly smart. I just, for the life of me, can't understand why he had anything nice to say about Fractal Noise. That misfire alone (Just the result of his good manners, politics, or kindness to fellow writers?), I think, tarnished my view of his work.

I'll add Vandermeer to my to-read list, thanks!

You may enjoy Peter Watts, especially Blindsight and its sequel, Echopraxia.

Watts is himself a biologist, with a refreshingly unromantic perspective on humanity's place in the universe.

(His other great story sequence, The Freeze-Frame Revolution, is some of the darkest sci-fi I've read since Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream".)

This is an excellent recommendation! I read Blindsight earlier this year. Easily one of my favorite sci-fi novels. It and Canticle for Leibowitz are in a class by themselves when it comes to sci-fi that deals with "philosophical" issues.

I'll check out The Freeze-Frame sequence next, thanks! First I just need to finish Consider Phlebas, which I'm finding pretty weak.

Transference is also on the to-do list. Watts says it is almost diametrically the opposite, intellectually, of Blindsight, but he also praises it.

The Freeze-Frame stories are officially called the Sunflower series. While different, they have the same alien creepiness that Watts is so good at, the extreme time frame (millions of years) makes it all the more chilling.

It's a novel plus one prequel short story ("Hotshot"), two sequels ("The Island" and "Giants"), and two short fragments. All the shorts can be found on his web site, I believe.

I also really enjoyed Echopraxia, the sequel to Blindsight. I think some people thought it was too different from what they expected; it doesn't pick up Siri Keaton's story, but tells a vaguely concurrent one. There's a Portia connection there too, by the way.

Consider Phlebas is one of my favourite Banks novels, but I know many people dislike it. If this is your first Banks book, don't write off Banks completely. Finishing Phlebas is a great stepping stone to read Look to Windward, which I personally think is Banks' best Culture novel.

What's Transference? The Ian Patterson book?

Sorry, my mistake: the title is Permanence. Author is Karl Schroeder. If I remember correctly (and clearly my memory isn't to be trusted), Watts says in the afterword of Blindsight that he violently disagrees with Schroeder, or the perspective Schroeder offers, in that book, but I believe he recommends it as a rich exploration of many of the issue Blindsight explores.

Thanks for the write up. I'm completely sold on Sunflower series, and will probably read it next. It sounds very promising -- and probably short enough that I can slip it in between books 1 and 2 of the Culture series.

Thanks also for the encouragement to stick with Banks, too. I'll try. I'm not sure I'll be able to last for six full books though. The storytelling in Consider Phlebas -- which I'd call action-adventure sci-fi maximalism -- isn't working all that well for me. There's so much technobabble. There are so many lasers. So much ink is spilled filling out the world just for the sake of it. It's a massive overload and baroque overdose of sci-fi tropes. So far the most interesting episode has been, I think, the main character's interaction with the shuttle on the island.

I think that Blindsight is a much tighter story with great horror (existential or otherwise) elements, and the consciousness themes were outstanding.

I liked Echopraxia, but the concept of the god-virus is not as fleshed out. Still the treatment of Portia spiders by itself make the book worthy of a read.

After reading your comment, I visited a synopsis of Echopraxia, because, I realized, I could remember almost nothing of it -- only a few snapshots of a space station and vampiric predation. Turns out it left almost no imprint on my brain. Blindsight is, I agree, much tighter (and thus, for me apparently, more memorable). Looking back on Echopraxia, I wonder whether it suffers, as Children of Time*, I think, does, from trying too hard to expand its established universe.

The god virus really is a fun idea -- more of Watts' one-man war on the tree of life (not only is God not at the top some metaphysical/ontological hierarchy; it's at the very bottom) -- but, in retrospect, I think you're right that it's not as well developed as it could have been or maybe needed to be.

Thanks, I'll check out Permanence, never heard of this author.

Oh, Banks is definitely maximalism. I always enjoyed him as a kind of more serious version of Douglas Adams; his books are infused with a kind of wry, mildly nihilistic comedy, full of colourful, somewhat random exposition and sarcastic asides. His "Outside Context Problem" [1] is like something straight out of the Hitchhiker's Guide.

Phlebas is pretty atypical among the Culture series, in that's not particularly funny, but actually pretty grim. It's not even told from the point of view of the Culture. There is lots of classic Banks shenanigans — the set pieces (Clean Air Turbulences, the Game of Damage), the drones, the long expositions of backstory, they're all there in later novels.

He's rarely all lasers and explosions, though! Keep in mind that Phlebas is his "Hollywood world war 2 movie" book. It's his version of the "suicide mission behind enemy lines" Hollywood plot (think The Dirty Dozen or maybe Cross of Iron). But it's also a really grim version of it. It ends up on a poignant note, then undermines its entire premise by pointing out, in the appendix — which explains what happened to the characters afterwards — that none of it actually mattered in the end. This poignancy is carried over to Look to Windward, a sequel set about 800 years later that examines the long-term consequences of the war depicted in Phlebas. So much of the Culture books are about the consequences of war and the desire to avoid it at all costs.

Just because I'm a roll, I'd like to add that I think Banks' non-Culture sci-fi is underrated. A standout is Feersum Endjinn, which always struck me as a novel Terry Pratchett could have written if he'd been into hard sci-fi. It's set on a future earth where most of humankind has long ago left for the stars, and the remaining, rag-tag population has descended into a medieval class inhabiting the gothic megastructures left by the previous generations. Much of the book is told by one of Banks' most memorable and endearing characters, a young monk-like simpleton who writes phonetically á la Riddley Walker (hence the book's scrambled title) and who inadvertently bumbles his way into a conspiracy between the warring classes. Shades of China Miéville and William Gibson here, too, with the baroque city landscape and cyberpunky "cryptosphere" holding the uploaded images of the dead.

I also really enjoyed his early novel (but later-published) Against a Dark Background, a road movie of a crime heist thriller set in a sort of anti-Culture universe, a planet so distant from any galaxy that its civilization has given up ever trying to reach the stars. Like Phlebas it's very grim, and not for everyone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Prob...

I know this isn't the kind of reply people usually offer on HN, but I do want to say: you are indeed on a roll. I've thoroughly enjoyed this and your other comments, have read them several times, and noted the authors and titles you suggested, putting them high on my to-read list. The judgments you've offered in the thread have been refreshing, sharp, and just a delight to read. Thanks again for the write-ups!

Thanks for the kind words, hope you like my recommendations!

player of games is a great starting point

Blindsight is remarkable for its exploration of what intelligent life without consciousness might be like.

For me personally I was amazed that one of the lead characters is a vampire. I'm completely burned out on vampire stories yet Watts made one I very much enjoyed. Even if you're also bored with vampires, I recommend you try this book.

I didn't understand the vampire thing. That seemed like the least realistic part of the story.

Oh, man, I love the vampires, realistic or not.

They're a hominid and belong to our species but are completely alien and terrify humans at a deep, genetic, evolutionary level. I love the way Watts describes Siri's involuntary reaction to the vampire, as though his fear and awareness of being viewed as little more than a potential meal are baked into his biology.

Similar to a newborn duckling that instinctively hides from shadows of a certain shape even though it has no concept of birds of prey, Siri experiences, when he interacts with the vampire, some similarly ancient, autonomic memory from the time when our ancestors were prey animals. We become little more than flighty, paranoid herd animals, jumping at the merest snap of a twig, like deer, when we find ourselves in the presence of an animal that flips the appropriate switch in our biology.

It's a wild, compelling subversion of so many sci-fi tropes and so much self-congratulatory tree-of-life bullshit and so much of our instinctual belief system regarding the way we fit into the world. It's also a completely novel (as far as I know) approach to undermining the notion of humanity's specialness, highlighting the fact that we're just animals -- and that our betters are, too, just as the invading aliens are, in a very different way.

Good call. That said, it was only on a second reading of each, a few years after the first, that those two books clicked for me.

The sunflower cycle (which FFR is part of) is positively optimistic compared to the rifters universe. Which is also a great read.

Yeah, same thing with his Final Architecture series, promising but in the end middling. Great alien/synthetic mind concepts, but as the story goes on most of them behave just like humans except with funny ways of talking. Tchaikovsky's concepts are amazing, but he needs to pair up with another author who's better at aliens as characters.

That's a terrific point, and I agree completely. This also explains my most recent sci-fi misadventure: a novel by Christopher Paolini, Fractal Noise, that earned glowing praise from Tschaikovsky. It is a dreadful novel -- wooden, stilted, repetitive, unimaginative -- but, hey, the concept is mildly interesting, so I guess it gets the Tschaikovsky seal of approval.

Peter F. Hamilton doesn't get a ton of praise for characterization (and I found his latest novel strangely, uncharacteristically vulgar and puerile), but I think he has a lot of the chops that Tschaikovsky lacks -- especially when it comes to language. Tschaikovsky's writing is at times awfully clunky. Hamilton's prose, by contrast, in my view at least, is in its own category among living sci-fi writers for its polish and effective use of the countless tools the language offers.

Interesting. I basically feel the opposite - I love Hamilton's ideas and plotting but really think he writes characters that don't feel real, they feel too much like archetypes. I can think of a few exceptions to this, but almost all of his characters feel like programmed automatons to me. And boy has he MISSED BIG when writing female characters at times.

Unlike the others, I think Tchaikovsky's best writing is in Children of Ruin. I know it's not as popular as Children of Time, but I admired the way he didn't rinse/repeat and instead created a wholly different view of humanity's legacy intersecting with alien life. I though the "antagonist" in that book was far more alien and creative.

Man, I'm impressed by the quality of the responses my offhand comments have received in this thread. I keep getting corrected and find myself agreeing with the corrections.

You're absolutely right that female characters are, uh, not his strength, and mostly I think you must be right about characterization in his work as a whole. That being said, when I ignore the male characters who seem like wish fulfillment of some adolescent power fantasy (Nigel Sheldon -- immortal genius, intergalactic industrialist, undisputed patriarch, and virile keeper of the harem? Please.) and the female characters who are, you know, young, "nubile," and hyper-sexual, the remaining roster is, I think, solid. Even the characters who are archetypes worked for me.

(Edit: sorry, I confused Children of Ruin and Children of Memory.)

And I find myself agreeing with your assessment of Children of Ruin. In some ways I think it's not well constructed, sort of stumbling through the mystery, winding up much longer than it needed to be, but the main character (no spoilers) has a psychological richness that I can't recall encountering in his other books and is the only of his characters to whose fate I've felt emotionally attached. The ending, too, is among the best and most affecting I've read in quite a while.

And, yes, the antagonist and setting is, I think, incredibly well conceived and well drawn.

So maybe I've changed my mind. Despite some structural issues that, I think, weaken the novel (and I think recall feeling that the 'reveal' came too early or just that the clues leading up to it were too obvious), it may be my favorite book in the series. Its more modest cosmic stakes and narrower field of view, than a lot of the other work of his that I've read, enable Tschaikovsky to develop it into something quite special.

> The second and third books leave something to be desired

Also got this feeling on the first read... but now I remember them very fondly! I like to think that this trilogy happens in the same universe as Dune, being a prequel to the events of Dune. The homage to the Dune universe by the author is obvious (the names of the books, the notion of "other memories", etc). But many notions fit together, with some effort in your imagination. The second book of the trilogy provides a mechanism to explain the other memories in the form of nodal biology. The octopi ftl technique is reminiscent of the guild navigators. The third book hints subtly at a reason why the butlerian jihad could have happened.