Children of Time

I found CoT to be tedious (unlike most who have read it). I reckon the spiders are the best characters. The humans are unbelievable, and there is no way they could have maintained their technology under the conditions given in the story line.

4.75 out of 5 stars

More often than not, I'm left feeling that a book with a cool/intriguing concept fails to properly deliver on said concept. Children of Time is an exception to this trend. I was blown away by how masterfully Tchaikovsky executes this evolutionary tale.

I was immediately hooked on the story, which builds and builds as a spider species on an alien planet evolves across millennia, while the last remnants of the human race exist in a sort of suspended stagnation just trying to survive in deep space. The narrative is told in a very straightforward way, with propulsive pacing and a tremendous amount of momentum. It's engrossing from start to finish with few lulls along the way. It easily joins the ranks of my favorite science fiction novels. Read this!

“Why should we be made thus, to improve and improve, unless it is to aspire?”

sigh I really wanted to like this book. I enjoyed the human story very much but the spider chapters felt like they were written by a different person. Exposition, exposition, exposition. I just didn't care. It felt like I was reading a school text book instead of a story.
It all came together with a good climax, but by that point I was more happy about finishing the book than I was about enjoying the story.
Obviously a talented author, but this didn't do it for me.

Spiders in Space I bought the book based on the blurb thinking I had an idea of what the story was about. Well...I wasn't entirely wrong but had I known it was partly about a race of giant, intelligent spiders I probably wouldn't have picked it up because a) I really can't stand the beasts and b) it would have sounded too ridiculous for my taste. However, I started to read it and once I realised what was going on I somehow wanted to find it silly but I couldn't, I got entirely drawn in. The civilisation building was amazing - I'm always in awe of someone who can imagine something like that. It did drag a little in places but I think that was just because I wanted to find out what was going to happen. When it came to the show-down I couldn't decide who I wanted to win. It felt like a mixture of Doctor Who's Planet of the Spiders mixed with The Face of Evil episodes (yes, I am a Doctor Who fan) add some Rama to it and finish it all off with Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora and still it had a flavour all of its own. Fantastic!

Very cool! Thoroughly enjoyed this.

The resolution was a bit abrupt, but I'm glad it wasn't the beginning of a series. (I'm tired of series right now.)

Highly recommended for sci-fi lovers

Children of Time is a great book in the vane of classic sci-fi books involving spaceships and strange cultures. Although it didn't grip me quite as much as most of my 5 star books I was so impressed with the core concept and the way an inherently unlikable species was endeared to the reader without anthropomorphising them. As it says on the cover, this is probably the best evolutionary sci-fi I've read.

An SF epic, limited (mostly) to one planet but roaming oh so far in time. We follow the evolution of uplifted spiders over a huge span of years, tracking their scientific advances and societal development. Probably loses two stars for getting a little baggy midway and for spending too much time on humans who are neither as cool or interesting as the spiders, but then it gets one back for an ending that is clever and hugely satisfying. A good read.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

Peter F Hamilton described this book as “smart” and after reading it I can only agree with him. The premise of this book is that part of the human race think that humans should be the only beings in the universe. They end up in conflict with other humans who are trying to expand to other worlds and in combination with a virus that speeds up the intelligence in animals, are seeding these planets with chimpanzees that hopefully will become smart enough to be slaves for the humans. The book starts with this conflict finally getting to a breaking point and the next 580 pages are the results of that war.

But on the planet where this book takes place, the seeding doesn't go to plan. The virus gets to the surface but the chimpanzees don't. Which means the virus starts acting on the other life on the planet. And this results in my favourite thing about this book: smart spiders. I feel this would be a good point to mention if you don't like insects or have arachnophobia, this book probably isn't for you. The clever thing the author has done with this book is he has taken the nature of spiders and extrapolated what they would do if they were able to evolve to the point of thinking for themselves. He has also pointed out some problems that come with this and it actually is relevant to our modern day.

Okay so female spiders eat the males. So in this book it has got to the point where the females are strong and the males are almost a weaker race. The males have virtually no rights and are basically just there to please the females. At any point they could be killed and it's not against any type of law the spiders have. It even gets to the point (and I bookmarked this page because I loved it so much), that the elder female spiders justify the younger ones hunting and killing males because “girls will be girls”. The whole thing is our modern day problems but turned on it's head and I love it so much.

And then we have the humans, the whole way through you have this overwhelming sense of doom when it comes to the humans. They are literally the last of their race fighting to find a planet where they can start again. Of course they come across the planet full of spiders and as you can imagine it doesn't go well for the humans. Now the really clever thing is the humans have got to the point where they have the technology to put people in stasis for long periods of time. So over the course of the book, which takes around 2500 years. You have the same human characters and they get to see (along with the reader) how the spiders go from tiny little normal spiders into a spacefaring race.

I really don't want to say too much about the end, but it was fantastic because it did not end the way I expected it to and yet considering the nature of the spiders it made total sense that it would the way it did. And if I still haven't convinced you to read this book I don't think anything else will. Unless you're scared of spiders in which case don't read it.

One can say anything one likes about the quality of content on Tumblr, but one cannot deny that, if one follows the right blogs and blocks enough of the wrong ones, it???s possible to find gems amidst the dross on a regular basis. I stumbled across one particular gem early this year: a post which talked about how, in science fiction, humans always seem to be portrayed as weaker and less threatening than aliens, when in fact it???s quite possible that we are the dangerous ones, not the other way around. It???s a hilarious post, of course, especially for anyone who is interested in sci-fi, but it does lead to some interesting questions about what it means to be human in space - or what it means to be ???alien???, for that matter.

The question of ???What is alien???? is an especially interesting (albeit occasionally thorny) question that sci-fi writers tackle on a regular basis, particularly those who are interested in telling First Contact stories. Earlier this year I read Carolyn Ives Gilman???s Dark Orbit, which in many ways is a typical First Contact story: humans on an exploratory mission unexpectedly come into contact with an alien race, and that contact leads to a great many changes, both for humanity and the aliens.

Now, while Dark Orbit is quite an enjoyable novel, and poses some interesting questions and tackles some intriguing themes, it is, as I said, a ???typical??? First Contact novel, wherein the alien species is one completely unknown to humanity, and (likely) bears no relation to our species at all. In Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky proposes an entirely different scenario - and does so in a highly entertaining manner.

Children of Time tells the story of humanity???s journey to the stars: first in pursuit of discovery, and then in pursuit of survival. After generations of nuclear and environmental catastrophe that has made Earth all but uninhabitable, the last few survivors of the human race board an ark ship and head out to the stars, following the clues and remnants left behind by their more advanced predecessors in order to find a new home: a terraformed world ready for human habitation. But once they find the treasure they seek, they find out that something is not quite right, and that the new home they have long hoped and sought for is, in fact, occupied - and those occupants will not give up their hold so easily.

The above summary makes this novel look like a First Contact story in the same vein as Dark Orbit. However, it is not - something that quickly becomes obvious to the reader once they have gotten a few chapters into the book. First of all, Tchaikovsky considers what one might mean when one uses the concept of ???alien??? in sci-fi. For most readers (and perhaps a lot of writers), it means a completely different species, one that has no relation at all to humans. While Tchaikovsky does indeed use that more traditional meaning in this novel, he considers what it might mean if the aliens are, in fact, ourselves:

???There???s this myth that advanced cultures will be so expansively cosmopolitan that they???ll be able to effortlessly talk down to the little people, right? But the Empire never intended its tech to be forward-compatible with primitives - meaning us. Why would it? Like everyone else, they only ver intended to talk to each other.???

One of the most popular quotes from the novel The Go-Between, written by L.P. Hartley, goes: ???The past is another country; they do things differently there.??? And this is quite true: we oftentimes look back into history and wonder: what were they thinking? Why did they do what they did? And sometimes, what we find there is so strange or incomprehensible to those of us in the present day that the past does not seem like another country so much as another world entirely. Though they are the same species as us, our ancestors can sometimes seem very much like aliens.

This is an idea that Tchaikovsky takes to an interesting extreme in this novel by showing what happens to humanity if something causes it to regress from a socio-cultural high point into a kind of ???dark age???. This idea is nothing new: it has happened in history, and many other writers have taken a similar angle in their writing. But what makes Tchaikovsky???s take on it interesting is that he tries to look at the similarities, not the differences, between humans at their highest and humans at their lowest. The most scientifically-advanced human in the story is shown to be no different from the least advanced. To be sure, there are vast gaps between the two in terms of, say, scientific knowledge, but at base, they are the same: both driven to survive, and to attain that survival by any means necessary.

Tchaikovsky also draws upon similarities when discussing the novel???s alien race. I cannot say too much about them, as that would ruin a lot of what makes this novel so very interested to read, but here is a quote that shows just how similar the aliens are to humans:

Another handful of her kind are already there, seeking the reassurance of the numinous, the certainty that there is something more to the world than their senses can readily grasp; that there is a greater Understanding. That, even when all is lost, all need not be lost.

Oftentimes in sci-fi stories, especially First Contact stories, lots of writers try to highlight what makes the aliens different from humans - sometimes in ways that make the aliens better than us, other times in ways that make them worse. But in choosing to highlight the similarities instead of the differences, Tchaikovsky gradually lays down the groundwork for the novel???s primary theme: that empathy - the ability to see someone else not as ???Other??? but as ???Same??? - is what makes us all human, and that it is the trait that should define humanity as a species, both now and in the future.

It is that focus on empathy that, I think, really makes this novel not just an enjoyable read, but in the end, an uplifting one. Over and over again, in ways both subtle and overt, the reader is asked to try to see things differently - whether it is to understand the world through the eyes of an alien, or through the eyes of humans trapped in a situation where a single wrong decision can mean the death of the entire species. It is a timely message too; after all, a brief glimpse at current news headlines ought to convince any reader that maybe, if we were all a little more empathetic towards not just our fellow humans, but to Mother Nature too, we might not be facing so many threats to our ability to live in a peaceful and healthy world.

It also helps that Tchaikovsky???s prose is quite readable. While it is not exactly the same as the prose of some other, more lyrical writers, and while he has a tendency to lay it on a bit thick in some places, he does have a fairly good handle of both the language and the direction of the plot, managing to keep three distinct plots going while still ensuring that the novel reads as one, cohesive whole. While some readers might be drawn to one particular plot more than the others (I certainly was), by the novel???s latter third it becomes clear that all those disparate stories actually do form one whole, and Tchaikovsky could not have achieved the ending any other way.

Overall, Children of Time is an unexpected gem of a novel: not because it does anything extremely grand or groundbreaking, but because it has an emotional heart that readers don???t often see in sci-fi, certainly rarely in First Contact novels. Even better, that emotional heart is treated in a way that is not tawdry or sappy; rather, Tchaikovsky takes the time to lay down the groundwork in such a way that, by the time the reader gets to the end, it rings uplifting and true rather than flat and false.