Adrian Tchaikovsky

WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life.But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovksy's award-winning novel Children of Time, is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?span

Tobias V. Langhoff

I re-read this book (first read in 2018) to warm up to the imminent release of Children of Memory, and it's still as amazing as last time. We follow a thoughtfully devised "alien" life form as its civilization evolves in lockstep with the devolving remnants of the human civilization aboard a generation starship, the latter told through a Shift-like narrative where our protagonist intermittently wakes up from cryosleep to witness the passing of the ages. There's gender politics, creation of biological computers from first principles, religion and Messiah complexes, and much more, culminating in (spoiler alert) what's ostensibly a very hopeful message about overcoming differences and strife.

Awesome premise and execution, I have no idea how this made me care for spiders of all things

Great read for speculative fiction fans! The architecture of the book is vast and captures the anthropological quest of species looking to survive and to make sense of their future (and past). The one aspect of criticism I had for the text is actually unrelated to the story itself. There were typos and some grammar issues that only slightly detracted from the experience. 

Joe Herrington

Aamna

[Audiobook] 
3.4 stars

Super interesting premise. Was absolutely hooked for the first & last 30%. Middle felt dragged.

Stephen Campbell

SENTIENT SPACE SPIDERS!! 

The most fun I've had reading any book for easily a decade. Smart, sprawling, millennia-spanning evolutionary SF, brimming with ideas and blending tones as disparate as humour to body-horror on a galactic scale. A work of such joyful, audacious imagination I felt literally giddy reading it. Can't recommend it highly enough.

It tries to be grand in scope, but ultimately it falls flat. Never really felt for any of the main characters, as they are very one dimensional.

Sebastian Stoelen

Truly grand in scope, Children of Time rightfully claims its place in the sci-fi pantheon among Asimov’s Foundation and Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth's Past.

Frederik De Bosschere

Hernando

I was a bit worried when I started reading this book thinking about the spiders and bringing my memories back when I read A Fire Upon the Deep and all the stuff with the Thines because that was the only thing I was bored a bit in AFUtD. Well I was surprised by how interested I was on the spiders and their world. I did not like the end but It was a great read.

Gavin

Initially, this looked like a Brin rip-off, or a Vinge rip-off, or even a Pratchett rip-off. And the prose is just serviceable. Title sucks too. 

But it blooms: the long evolutionary pathway it follows - from a spider jeeust 'thinking' that pack hunting might be a good idea, to a full manned space program - is excellent. The alternative technological route is the great bit - what would industry look like without fossil fuel, a mechanised society without metal? - and the protagonist spiders who find the route are easy to empathise with. 

Ants are used as robots, factories, laboratories, and eventually as CPUs:

  There are hundreds of tamed ant colonies within Great Nest, not counting those in the surrounds that undertake the day-to-day business of producing food, clearing ground or fending off incursions of wild species. Each colony has been carefully trained, by subtle manipulation of punishment, reward and chemical stimulus, to perform a specific service, giving the great minds access to a curious kind of difference engine.



{over-literal bull-shit}
(Tchaikovsky overstates massively the potential of ants as a processing channel, though - witness the giant leap in practicality from ~1cm mechanical relays to (even the crappiest) fully-electronic vacuum-tube. Nothing so slow and large as an ant colony could carry out much logic-gate work without taking much longer than a human-level worker and anyway accumulating huge errors.)
\{/over-literal bull-shit}

 (Their bioengineering stuff is actually more realistic than Vinge's spiders' breakneck 50-year sprint through the C20th and C21st centuries, even if you include the Uplifting virus. This is because Vinge's telling is deterministic - they discover all the same stuff as us, in mostly the same order - and their culture a cartoon of ours.) 

His other successful theme is incomprehension: females not understanding male liberation, spiders not understanding how a depressed solitary human could be sentient, Kern not understanding anything. (Mostly the spider gender politics are boring, just bizarro patriarchy with a cannibal twist.)

The main antagonist, the mad hubristic scientist starts off dull and strawish (why did it take 300 years for her to ask what rough genus the spiders were?) but the moment she stops that stuff and reaches across the species barrier is quite beautiful.

Also, Tchaikovsky often drops out of the Spiders' worldview mid-sentence to telegraph what you, a human, should be thinking of all this (an example is the use of "curious" in the passage above). 

The humans are less interesting, fairly stock generation-shippers. There is this inversion, that the scholar of dead languages is Key Crew, plot-critical all the time:

  To study and laud those antique psychopaths during the Earth's last toxic days had seemed bad taste. Nobody liked a classicist.



Anyway worthwhile, momentarily dazzling.

***

How does it do as Serious science fiction?

Social development: Lots. The spiders' matriarchal anarchism is shown with realistic downsides. The ark ship humans go through several revolutions and regressions.

Software development: Some, but all pretty high-level. Thousands of years of uptime for some systems, with only hints at how to keep it going. Some nice linguistic archaeology.

Actual Science: Mostly evo bio, little bit of computer science and crypto maybe.

Elizabeth Jones

Abhishek

**Hook:**

Wall-E meets Starship Troopers, not exactly!

**Plot Summary**

Humans seeking a new home to live on, run against a terraformed earth like planet being protected by Dr. Kern and her satellite, a thousands of year old relic of the mighty, multiplanetary human empire.

The spiders on the planet have evolved into much more by Dr. Kern's nano-virus experiment originally intended for monkeys. 

**Praise:**

Very original tale out of cliché Sci-Fi tropes like destroyed planet and giant spiders. Loved the way author managed to this.

Strong character development for certain characters.

Amazing twist, makes me anticipate the next book.

**Critique:**

Motivation for certain characters is not justified.

Destruction of the human empire is quite not believable and could have been explored and justified a bit more.

Story emphasizes the view point of a certain character too much the pay off is not there or the character is really dull.

**Recommendation:**

Highly recommended!

**Your Rating:**

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

brilliant concept and story, however ending felt a bit weak.

Ollie Barker

Shona Tiger

Very imaginative! Wanted a different ending, but ok 😊😊

Sade A

"Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them - not even its own reflections"..


One of my main fear with reading Science Fiction is that i'll be unable to understand anything going on because of the tendency to have scientific jargons in it. However, 

This book. 

This book is hands down one of the best books i've read this year. Like mind = blown. Tchaikovsky weaves a brilliant tale of what it means to be human, what it means to be sentient. Children of Time is like holding up a mirror to yourself and asking is this what it means to be human? 

"The whole point of civilisation is that we exceed the limits of nature"


The hallmark of this book is that it it's not just mindless action but instead examines and tackles various themes from artificial intelligence, colonisation, god complex and all in an intelligent fashion.

"Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed but empathy - the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too - conquers all, in the end.

Alexander Aguirre

It was a very good book, I enjoyed the world building process and often wondered how such ideas could come to someone. The only reason I don’t give it 5 stars is because I didn’t enjoy the outcome chapters as much as the long descriptive process.

Amazing. I couldn’t put it down. Such a unique perspective and sequence of events. I love the twist ending. 

Rachel B

Jay Harris

Loved the beginning. Loved the ending. But the 400 pages in the middle are very slow. 

It's clear from the opening chapters where the story is heading, and I'm not sure that the long, long journey to get there felt necessary.

Anna Troughton 

Wow. This was an incredibly fast placed and great read. Now I'm not the biggest fan of Sci-fi but I thought I would give this book a go because of all the good things I heard about it! And it lived up to all the positive hype! This is a very unique and very interesting read! I was going to rate it 4 stars at first but the ending has completely won be over and this is one of the best books I have read.

Winner of the 30th anniversary Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel. Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed novel Children of Time, is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age – a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth? 'Children of Time is a joy from start to finish. Entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human.' - Patrick Ness, author of A Monster Calls.

Winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award

Pavonini

I loved this book. Loved.

Main character a classicist, and that actually comes in handy? Great.
Spider evolution? YES.
Spider society & technology? Loved it.

I cared and I wanted more, and the resolution was perfect.

Colin

Incredible grand-scale sci-fi. Going on my re-read shelf right away.

Zoey Mikalatos

Amazing! Very good writing, and interesting point of view. The spiders are strangely human and inhuman at the same time.

"Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy - the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too - conquers all, in the end."

Dweedle 

Great contemplation on gods, machines, and humanity. Fantastic parallel storytelling and world building. Well worth it if you’re into sci-fi

Frida Kahlo

Liam Byrne 

The last humans in the galaxy are desperate. Having left a dying Earth, to stumble across a perfectly terra-formed planet seems too good to be true – and it is. On its surface, evolving and developing for millennia, is a species that won’t be so willing to give up their planet, even to the humans that feel it rightfully belongs to them. This collision course, played out over many years, is the central narrative of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ‘Children of Light’, yet it manages to explore ideas about society, religion and what truly is out there with aplomb.

In the opening chapter, an act of terrorism sabotages a human experiment designed to terraform a planet. Within the spaceship were monkeys as well as a virus designed to allow the primates to develop and evolve on their new planet. A plan developed by Avrana Kern, the explosion caused by the terrorist kills the monkeys and sends the virus out into the atmosphere. A last ditch attempt by Kern to escape sees her upload her image into her escape ship’s computer, essentially forming a computer/human symbiote, one that would eventually be reunited with the planet which her plan had helped to form.

What works really well throughout the novel is that the story is told through two different narrative threads. The Gilgamesh, the ship which carries the hopes of a planet, and its story are seen through the eyes of Holsten Mason, a classicist. Down on Kern’s planet, it isn’t the primates that she had hoped for who benefitted from the virus, but spiders. Whilst the human struggles of trying to find a place in the galaxy play out on the Gilgamesh, the evolution of the spiders and their world adds another layer to the engaging storyline as each generation builds upon the experience of the last.

Tchaikovsky uses some clever narrative techniques to allow the narrative to last the thousands of years that we see play out over six hundred pages. Rather than overwhelm the reader with names, the focus is only ever on three spiders (Portia, Bianca and Fabian), each of which is the name also bestowed on the next generation. As for the humans, stasis sleep and cryo-chambers mean that Mason, as well as Isa Lain (the main secondary character) and other key figures on the ship, can be frozen and woken as the narrative requires it. Whilst this might otherwise feel a little bit forced, Tchaikovsky works the story in such a manner that it never feels too knowing.

Though the human arc is fascinating, including mutinies, in-fighting and a love story, it is definitely the spiders’ story that is more interesting. Presumably chosen for the phobias they engender in many people, the spiders create a society, fight off potential enemies, develop what effectively amounts to religions and conduct experiments. The intelligent way that they are presented, all the way through to the end collision between the two species that serves as the ending to the book, makes them a consistently empathetic group, especially when contrasted with some of the more egomaniacal characters that are involved with the running of the Gilgamesh.
 
‘Children of Time’ is the very definition of a page turner – its six hundred pages fly past as Tchaikovsky effortlessly takes us through a tale that lasts many thousands of years with verve and panache.

Children of Time

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