Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Format: Kindle
Read: March 2024

Children of Time has been right on the edge of my radar for a while now, I’d seen lots of great things about it but other books were just higher on my list. And then, one of my partners’ friends recommended and lent him a copy, and at the same time, I spotted it popped up for 99p on Kindle. I like it when we get to read a book at the same time because we have such different reading tastes it can lead to some interesting chats! And it turns out two more of his friends have also read it recently, so lots of discussion around on this one.

Plot

The premise is that in the far future human scientists are about to launch a bold new experiment to study the effects of a specially engineered virus on a newly terraformed planet. The intention was to study the accelerated evolution of primates, but when war breaks out plans go awry and the virus ends up targeting the local arachnid population.

Thousands of years later an arc ship carrying the last remnants of humanity is looking for a new planet to make home.

🕷️ Spiders

The spider portions were interesting and made me think about the way we humans look at the world, particularly our tendency towards domination and destruction. It is this that bumps up what would otherwise be a three-star read for me to four stars. It is amazing to me that the author pulled off writing a book with slowly evolving sentient spider characters! And we are not talking about spider-people hybrids, they very much remain spiders with crucial differences in thought, language and behaviour to the humans. The fact that they are spiders is very much the point!

Though initially I didn’t mind the scientific reasoning for the path their evolution takes after a while, because I don’t understand the biology (or have a particular desire to), I just started to skim read all the explanatory stuff (much like when I read Project Hail Mary I skipped over all the maths!).

I enjoyed that the spiders are named after romance novel/soap opera characters (Portia, Bianca, Viola, Fabian). Having been an Eastenders fan in its heyday, there is something hilarious to me about a spider called Bianca.

(I just realised how incredibly weird this book must sound to anyone who had not already read it!).

🚀 Humans

I do like the idea of a human colony ship on a thousands year journey, but then I found – as I always do – all the time jumps involved kept me from being truly invested in the characters, or understanding them. We only sort of get to know POV character Holsten, and eventually Lain but that comes so late in the book that she felt like wasted potential as easily the most interesting character. Really all the interesting stuff takes place while Holsten is frozen in his pod, and he just gets woken up an intervals and has to catch up on events without ever experiencing them first hand.

To get very picky about why this book didn’t completely thrill me, I felt there was a big hole in the human side of the story that I found distracting. We are told that humanity destroyed itself, and the technology was disabled somewhere around one to two thousand years ago (the start of the book). So far in the past that Holsten’s people refer to the “ancients” and the “Old Empire,” know next to nothing about what really happened, and now speak different languages.

The technology that humans have now is meant to be basic compared to that of the Old Empire. I guess building giant arc ships for a thousands-year journey is relatively simple technology compared with nano viruses and terraforming. Clearly, there was something akin to a Dark Age, but I wanted to understand a bit more about the reasoning and ideology behind all of that. My mind wasn’t satisfied with such a vast expanse of missing history and human experience (how did society collapse, survival rates, religion, education etc), that explains how all these people came to be on the arc ship. Holsten is our POV and we never learn anything about his past life, anything about his family, relationships or how he came to be on the key crew.

I suppose at the end of the day I am more interested in who and how the humans came to be where they are, rather than the biological reasoning for how spiders could form a society or create technology!

Writing

As for pacing, at times it did feel a bit hard going (mainly in the middle spider bits), and when things did pick up it would only be a chapter before another big time jump that broke my engagement. This is always something I struggle with in books! I would prefer to have spent a bit more time with the humans, witnessing more of the pivotal events, and understanding them as people so I could feel more invested in the individual characters.

All that said though the ideas and imagination here are incredible! It’s such a cool idea, and actually very well executed despite not aligning with my very picky personal preferences. While I didn’t love it, I am open to reading the next book in the series which is honestly a huge endorsement for me (I rarely get into a series)! I am intrigued to see where the heck this is going to go!

I am on a bit of a streak with books like this, where I definitely understand why other people are so excited about it but it just misses my sweet spot.¹ For what its worth my (not a sci-fi fan and arachnophobe) partner gives this 5 stars and states “it’s the best science-fiction book I’ve ever read.”

If you like more thought provoking science fiction, I highly recommend giving it a go.

1. See Wuthering Heights and Rebecca! ↩︎