Children of Time

OH WHAT AN ENDING!!!!!! Empathy conquers all made me tear up ngl. Full review in the morning!!!

Morning after edit:
The best possible ending was achieved beyond my imagination in a sardonically hilarious way.

I am a character driven reader, more than plot more than themes, so it took me a while to get through this 600-pager where I barely connected with any of the characters but it was all so worth it for that ending.

Inventive, smart, and so full of grace for these flawed sentient monkeys (and spiders). Approach with patience and you will be rewarded greatly.

Oh I'm never getting over that ending, I love it so much.

One of my favorites...

The best sci-fi book I've ever read. I will exclude Frankenstein from that list because I don't want to dive too deeply into which is my favorite.

Clear descriptive writing that allowed me to rip through these pages. No weak subplots or unnecessary twists. A master class in writing.

The world and concept was so creative and unique no other evolution based book comes close in the depth or execution of the concept.

The spider culture was fascinating and cataloguing all the changes over thousands of life cycles with their immense leaps brought me great joy. The female male dynamic and the civil rights march was so interesting to see. Assassinations for freedom!

Yet from the human perspective these creatures came across as horrors. There was a good amount of terror in this book. From a woman machine taking over a ship and projecting herself onto the screen and over the speakers, to the crawling impending doom of the spiders.

Cannot recommend enough.

Incredible. I have no words.

Sci-fi by and large is one of least favorite genres but with ideas/execution this creative it tore down my bias and let me enjoy a story while not perfect, is still throughly enjoyable.

The first of a very interesting trilogy. Each book is slightly different in its approach, with different protagonist - Arachnid in this one. It did have a and ending that I was not expecting. Recommended to who likes Banks (he lacks the humour that Banks has however)

Idk if it's just because I listened to this vs reading it but my god I hated this with all my heart. This is written just like Doors of Eden but slightly less boring

A must-read for the other sci-fi and evolutionary biology enthusuasts out there.

TThis book is good for so many reasons, it manages to deliver very interesting ideas but always feels grounded in the characters. It has the most interesting imagining of non-human intelligence I've seen.

While I liked the story, I think this book was simply too long and I was very close to lose my interest somewhere between the halfway and the last quarter. Hence only 3 stars.

8.05/10.00

This is book of two tales, of two civilization. One is novel, fascinating, almost fantastical in its plausibility. The story of Portia Labiata is filled with brilliant ideas, page-turning action and world building, science fiction at its finest. The story of the last remnants of humanity is less so. It is filled with a unimpressive narrator, few good ideas and un-investable characters. When the tales collide, the book ends with a satisfying crunch of surprise.

Some of the ideas in this book are simply incredible! The algae-ant satellite, the grey planet, the final nanoviral twist, the planetary dyson ring, the biological tech, the recurring spiders Portia, Bianca and Fabian through the arc of evolution! Brilliant!

Not what I expected at all. Very well thought out evolution pathways and realistic time jump experience.

You've got Dr. Avrana Kern of the technologically advanced Old Empire, seeking to terraform planets and seed them with an evolutionary accelerating nano-virus. Her efforts are stymied by the escalating conflicts back home on Earth that manages to corrupt her mission, forcing her to upload her consciousness to an orbiting satellite where she grapples with her own sanity over the ensuing millennia. Meanwhile the nano-virus ends up infecting spiders, the planned primates completely destroyed on arrival. We follow the spider civilization through the millennia as they advance through their own dark ages, renaissance, and technological revolutions.

Meanwhile, thousands of years after the wars that devastated the Earth, a new era of human discovery sets out on cannibalized technology from the Old Empire. The Gilgamesh and its host of explorers, kept ageless in cryostasis, are out looking for new world to inhabit. Victims of their own infighting, living on a ship that is crumbling around them even as new generations are born and die on board, they're running out of time to find this habitable world.

The chapters flip back and forth between these two worlds. Even as centuries slip by the pace is breakneck as we head to the inevitable collision of civilizations. Along the way we explore the nature of godhood and religious fervour, interspecies communication that extends beyond the interpreting of sounds, the fight for male spider rights, world ending game theory, and how people are just the worst.

As the first book of a trilogy, Children of Time stands on its own as a fantastic, award-winning read with a wonderfully satisfying ending that is up there as one of my favourite sci-fi reads of all time.

There were a lot of things I liked about this book. For me the thing that held me back from really enjoying it was that I felt no connection to the characters. Or well.... I did, or I would start to... and then it would be like hundreds of years later and thus new characters (kind of) and then repeat. I get that the name is children of time but do we really need to time jump 10 times?? I also really do not like spiders... BUT... surprisingly those were the characters I enjoyed the most, or that version of them but then poof...different reincarnated spiders. I don't know.. I really did want to like this and it just left me feeling hungry still, but not hungry for the next book, more like that meal was not satisfying so lets order pizza when we get home.

great science fiction!

The author has a knack for great (and often hilarious) writing. It's surprising to read a great story that was written so recently. I did expect more from the story progression but then there's book 2 and 3 as well. This book is smart, has a number of interesting sci fi ideas and themes.

One of the most breathtaking sci-fi books I have read. Big on ideas, scope and emotions

This book has 2 parallel plot lines. One about another species and another about humans on a ship.

I would highly recommend everyone to read only the parts about the other species. It's eye opening and intriguing to see how biology affects society and culture even in humanity.

But the human part is so damn boring. It's so long and it's such a fucking drag. 2 stars purely because I can't stand it. I never actually finished the book because of how boring it is.

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.

I kept finding so many little problems with the book, yet I kept reading and liking it. Perhaps my expectations (based on his interview on the Ezra Klein podcast) were too high. But the human characters were hard to relate to, the relationships between them flat and mechanical. It's like he spent more time developing the spiders than the humans. Twenty-year-old me would've been a-okay with that, today's me felt a little disappointed but is still planning to read the next book.

The science was ... inadequate. He tried really hard, though! A+ for effort, B- for accuracy. B- overall, that is: Some aspects – mind uploading; technology adaptation/innovation/maintenance on a millennial starship – were D-worthy at best, and there were countless “sigh... it Does Not Work That Way” moments, but the vast majority of the science is plausible and intriguing. I tamed my eyeroll response and feel that, taken all together, this was worth it. Tchaikovsky's heart is absolutely in the right place: he explores Big Questions worth exploring, and has developed a really promising, clever, sciencefiction-y universe.

This is a good, but not great, sci-fi. Future humans have decided to experiment with evolution on a far-away planet, and end up nurturing a civilization of intelligent spiders. The author does some interesting things to allow continuity of characters while also telling a story about generations of evolution, and the overall points being made are good, but pretty unsubtle. I liked the book...but probably also won't be running out for the sequel.

Well, that was interesting as hell! Easily one of the best - and unique - SF novels I've ever read.

Damn, had I known the premise I probably wouldn't have read it. Big mistake, this book is SO much fun.

Overview: A cleverly written, thought provoking SF book that follows an arkship containing the last of humanity, interwoven with the rise of spider civilisation on their destination world, terraformed long ago.

More detailed thoughts: “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a thought-provoking story that raises questions of the meaning of being human, human civilization and the unforeseen consequences of our actions, creating a captivating and immersive story.

At the heart of the tale lies Dr. Avrana Kern, a scientist leading an ambitious scientific endeavour to transform an inhospitable planet into a thriving ecosystem. However, as the delicate balance of the project teeters, the introduction of a genetically engineered virus meant to accelerate the evolution of primates becomes a catalyst for unforeseen turmoil. The onset of human conflict and the unfortunate fate of a barrel of monkeys, paves the way for the virus to permeate unintended organisms, most notably the brilliantly depicted spiders of the Portia labiata species.

Tchaikovsky excels at presenting the stark contrast between the spiders' rapid progression and the gradual decline of human civilization. It's a delicate dance that prompts us to reflect on our species' flaws and the fragility of our world.

Character development shines through. We not only see gripping short stories set at key moments in the rise of spider civilisation, we have a parallel series of tales as members of the crew of the ark ship, containing the last humans, are periodically awoken to deal with a series of crises. The dark and – frankly terrifying fate of Dr. Avrana Kern is revealed throughout the book, raising deep questions as to the nature of self and – quite frankly – what the ultimate superlative for horror is.

“Children of Time” not only paints a vivid world but also encourages us to question our own humanity. The blending of evolutionary themes, conflicts, and the consequences of our choices invites deep reflection about our place in the grand scheme of things. Tchaikovsky skilfully weaves these elements together, uplifting the novel beyond a simple tale.

A lot of people use the word “epic” when describing books, but very few come as close to the actual meaning of the word as Children of Time. What an incredibly sweeping story with huge emotional range too. It's also features great perspective-bending points of view and while often tense, morose, and critical of us Great Old Ones, the persistent thread of hope woven within keeps the reader turning pages just as the Gilgamesh keeps on flying. Recommended for anyone who loves a really big science fiction story and also is not an arachnophobe. Must love spiders.

Humans need a home
spot one that seems workable
decide to steal it.