Children of Time
Compelling
Intelligent
Suspenseful

Children of Time

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?
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Reviews

Photo of BC Hark
BC Hark@vaporvisions
5 stars
Nov 4, 2024

A fascinating concept of a book to read for sure. I found it really fascinating to consider a world wherein spiders become masters of their world and can bend it like humanity has. To see different innovations and a new world. The book reads a lot like a movie at first and then simmers down a bit, but kept my attention the whole way through, which says a lot since I find many endings in books sizzle out and make you wish you hadn't finished at all. 

I'm not sure if I'll read the other 2 books in the series, but I might do. What a fun book and concept. Truly thrilling. 

+3
Photo of Nate
Nate@wiredfractal
5 stars
Jul 25, 2024

I care more about the spiders than the human characters. What does that say about humanity?

+6
Photo of Sunky
Sunky@heysunny
5 stars
Jul 23, 2024

4.5

Photo of Tobias V. Langhoff
Tobias V. Langhoff@tvil
5 stars
Feb 24, 2024

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.

Photo of M.A
M.A@purplegarden
4.5 stars
Feb 21, 2024

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

Photo of Joe Herrington
Joe Herrington@joeherringtoniv
4.5 stars
Feb 3, 2024

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.

+3
Photo of Aamna
Aamna@aamnakhan
3 stars
Dec 20, 2023

[Audiobook] 3.4 stars Super interesting premise. Was absolutely hooked for the first & last 30%. Middle felt dragged.

Photo of Stephen Campbell
Stephen Campbell@stephencampbll
5 stars
Dec 18, 2023

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.

Photo of Sebastian Stoelen
Sebastian Stoelen@sebastianstoelen
2.5 stars
Jul 21, 2023

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.

+2
Photo of Frederik De Bosschere
Frederik De Bosschere@freddy
5 stars
May 23, 2023

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.

Photo of Hernando
Hernando@heagma
4 stars
Mar 22, 2023

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.

Photo of Gavin
Gavin@gl
3 stars
Mar 9, 2023

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.

Photo of Elizabeth Jones
Elizabeth Jones@emariet20
5 stars
Feb 26, 2023

One of the best I've ever read.

+3
Photo of Abhishek
Abhishek@starquake_82
5 stars
Feb 16, 2023

**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:** ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Photo of Ollie Barker
Ollie Barker@olliebrkr
4 stars
Feb 5, 2023

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

Photo of Shona Tiger
Shona Tiger@shonatiger
4 stars
Jan 19, 2023

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

Photo of Sade A
Sade A@bitterblue
5 stars
Jan 19, 2023

"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.

Photo of Alexander Aguirre
Alexander Aguirre@alecsolace
4 stars
Jan 17, 2023

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.

Photo of Rachel B
Rachel B@raebae
4 stars
Jan 7, 2023

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

+6
Photo of Jay Harris
Jay Harris@jayharris
3 stars
Jan 1, 2023

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.

Photo of Anna Troughton
Anna Troughton @annarose
5 stars
Nov 1, 2022

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.

Photo of Pavonini
Pavonini@papaver
5 stars
Sep 25, 2022

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.

Photo of Colin
Colin@saeculara
5 stars
Aug 30, 2022

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

Photo of Zoey Mikalatos
Zoey Mikalatos@zoeymik
5 stars
Aug 29, 2022

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."