Children of Ruin

Children of Ruin is good, but it's not quite as good as the first book in the trilogy.

To begin with, it looks as if it is going to follow a similar plotline to that, but with octopuses instead of spiders (this much is obvious from the opening paragraphs). However, it soon heads off in a different direction. We get the background of how the octopus civilisation got its start, but far less of its history, with the focus on the inhabitants of the human ship that originally explored the system they end up in. Partly, that's due to the fact that the octopuses are even more alien than the Portiids, so their history has less resemblance to a human one. But it's also, one assumes, to avoid repetition.

This is initially intercut with a story about a human/Portiid ship discovering the system and seeing the outcome of events unfolding in the other parts; this is deftly done to keep things mysterious even though we know that octopuses have to be involved somehow. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that there is something else at work as well, and this becomes the main antagonist, with some moments of horror as the seemingly unstoppable threat advances. It's all part of this series' exploration of non-human intelligence and it manages to keep this story feeling different from its predecessor even though it's dealing with the same general topics.

Still, the characters are once again not as memorable as the concepts and, without quite the same sweep as the first volume, it doesn't come up to the same mark. But it's a good read, nonetheless, and it looks like the third book will be off somewhere different again, keeping this more varied than the basic premise might suggest.