By now, I just accept the fact that Adrian Tchaikovsky can write about anything in SFF and do it brilliantly. Children of Memory, which follows the award-winning Children of Time and Children of Ruin, continues this great saga of human evolution and species uplift in multiple star systems. There is a moving and exciting story at its core, deeply engaging drama testing the limits of reality and identity, and a good encapsulated background of the earlier stories in case you haven’t read the previous books. But there is also a surfeit of intellectual discussion that keeps postponing a final reveal, and, for the first time in my experience of this author’s work, that reveal is a bit disappointing, even though it works in its own way. I can’t really discuss what happens in this novel without some spoiler-ish elements, so proceed at your own risk.

Children of Memory starts by drawing together three strands of the narrative. First, we’re with the core crew of the Enkidu, a huge ship with thousands of sleep-suspended humans aboard. It has escaped from a dying Earth and is heading for a new home where preliminary terraforming is supposed to have prepared a new human world. But there are problems. The Enkidu has breakdowns and multiple repairs, several crew members have been maimed or killed on the approach to Imir, and many of the human cargo have died and been jettisoned. Then the planet Imir isn’t what they were expecting, as drones reveal a poorly developed surface with only microbes and lichen on the land and plankton in the oceans, though the air is breathable. With hard work, Imir may be able to support a small settlement but not the many thousands of humans suspended in sleep.

We first see the result of settlement years later through the eyes of a young girl named Liff. She is twenty-six Imiri years old, and that translates to about twelve in Earth years. She lives with her parents on a farm at the edge of the town called Landfall near the forest of trees the settlers succeeded in planting. It’s a hard life, and some towns-folk have been blaming mysterious “others” for crop failures and breakdowns. The forest has become a forbidding zone where groups of Seccers or Watchers, imagined enemies whom no one has even seen, may be lurking. One evening, Liff sees her grandfather, Heorest Holt, who was the captain of the Enkidu, disappear into the woods. She is convinced he has gone to find a Witch, as she calls a powerful figure who, Liff imagines, lives there in a cave. It becomes her mission to enter that forest, find the Witch and get her grandfather back.

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But there are strange things about Liff’s experience. She claims to have seen her grandfather Heorest Holt, even though he died two hundred years earlier. Sometimes we see her in scenes with her parents, sometimes her parents are dead and she’s living with her harsh uncle, sometimes she is in the midst of meetings of the town’s founders, including Holt, as they discuss what to do about community problems. Sometimes, Liff goes in search of the Witch, sometimes that figure comes to seek her out. In each of these shifting scenes, we are drawn more and more deeply into mysteries of memory, time and reality.

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Just as the other books in this series end on a positive note of the continuing journeys through space to find new life, so does Children of Memory. But this story makes it so clear how difficult the search is and how rare it will be to find that subtle variance of chemistry that enables a new form of existence to detach itself from the void. Tchaikovsky is always trying something new and meaningful, and while this book may not be completely successful, it offers a powerful and thought-provoking experience.