Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor, £20)
Refugees from Earth wake from cold storage on board the ark ship Enkidu to find they have arrived at the empty planet Imir, which they hope to transform into a new home. Much of the story centres on Liff, the first child born on Imir, a witness to the colony’s struggle and decline. Life, never easy, becomes much harder when irreplaceable tech breaks down and there are crop failures. Paranoia grows as rumours about enemy spies take hold. But they are indeed being watched, and as the viewpoint shifts to that of the watchers, there are more revelations to come. Even as we get the bigger picture, mysteries increase. Has something affected the passage of time? Liff is too young to have all the memories she does. There were no birds among the few creatures imported from Earth, so where did two large, talking ravens come from? This is the third book in a sequence that began with the award-winning Children of Time, but can be read on its own as a thoroughly absorbing and enjoyable novel.
The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz, £18.99)
The latest novel set in the Hugo-nominated, Vietnamese-inspired Universe of Xuya begins with that cliche of genre romance, two people entering into a marriage of convenience. Readers know they will fall in love before the end, no matter how unlikely it seems. Here, the proposer doesn’t even have a human body, although her avatar appears as a matriarchal figure with a weathered, brown face. She is the Rice Fish, a mindship and leader of a notorious band of space pirates, and she makes the proposal to Xich Si, a young captive, who accepts for the protection her status as wife will afford. When her feelings change, she initiates sex in the normally forbidden “heartroom” of the ship with the semi-solid avatar, in an orgy of surreal perversity. Beyond the love story, there are more traditional space opera goings-on: power struggles, political manoeuvring, betrayals and discoveries, and many incidental pleasures provided by the detailed, vividly realised settings.
