Children of Time

Damn, this was... so good. 4.5/5.

Overall, this was a great book with some great themes on not just being human but of being a living thing at all, an organism that essentially shares a common ancestor with almost every other organism on this planet. I don't know what I was expecting going into this book but having half the chapters dedicated to spiders was definitely not one of them, nor was I expecting to become this invested into spider religion, culture, and politics. The premise was really a breath of fresh air too, and thoroughly engaging. it made the book feel a lot shorter than it actually was.

I liked how from early on in the book, we're already invited to see parallels between the wireless communications invented by humans with the way spiders communicate by vibrating the web. “... the signals danced across those millions of kilometers of void...” I'm sure it's no coincidence that this fleeting line about the Gilgamesh communicating with an unknown transmitter in space seemed to be paralleled to Portia and her spider friends also transmitting signals via web vibrations to the local species of spiders in the chapter before this one. It's a really cool parallel and one i never thought of before, how wireless communications that's second nature to us in this modern age isn't so different from the non-verbal ways animals communicate to each other.

This book isn't horror at all, but I really enjoyed the earlier chapters where we see Kern communicating with the crew of the Gilgamesh. Tchaikovsky seems to enjoy this gimmick of having two columns of text that are supposed to be superimposed upon one another (he does something similar in a more recent novella, Elder Race) and it's employed to fantastic effect here. Kudos also to Mel Hudson, the audiobook narrator, who really brought out the horror of Kern's desperate madness in her degeneration into something not entirely Avrana nor Eliza.

In the first half of the book, we also kept hearing a theme of how the spiders keep “thrumming with manifest destiny” and I knew I've heard that term somewhere before in my lit classes. It's a cultural belief from the 19th century that (white) American settlers were “destined” to settle and expand in North America, including removing and eliminating native populations. this is a really, really interesting parallel to draw in this whole situation - are the spiders the settlers, or the new humans? Whose is the manifest destiny? It's also telling that the ship containing the last batch of humans is called Gilgamesh, after the epic story of a king who didn't want to die (which then calls to mind Guyen and his quest for immortality later in the book).

In the last parts, humanity honestly got on my nerves, especially Karst. Any species, including humans, have a strong sense of self-preservation and we get that Kern's World is really their last hope before extinction, but the way Karst went about it was really annoying. Immediately just saying, we're gonna go in there and we're gonna burn down everything, kill everything on it, because now it's *our* home. he embodies the inherent selfish war-mongering nature of humans and it's really annoying to me. It also smacks too much of imperialism and colonialism, and how/why humans have invaded other territories and killed native populations since time immemorial. I also loved that we see the armed conflict from the human POVs. If I had just read this book skipping every spider POV chapter, I would've 100% rooted for the humans to win against the aliens, just like in any other alien monster sci-fi movie or book. In this case, though, we witnessed and was along for the ride with the evolution of the spiders alongside the degeneration of the last human society in their arkship, so allegiances are grayer here. I found myself rooting more for the spiders in this one tbh. They are defending their home planet against humans who quite certainly want to take over for their own survival, without sharing and leaving no survivors from the native population. Weighing that against the potential extinction of the human race was really weird.

Thoughts about the ending: it was a little overly optimistic with the nanovirus being almost a deus ex machina miraculously making the humans and spiders become one peaceful harmonious society with just a single fell stroke, but even if a little convenient, I thought it was still a pretty refreshing solution to the central conflict of the book.