Children of Time

TLDR: I loved it.Now the long-winded part:This novel won the Arthur C. Clarke award for good reason. A tour de force, a brilliant and thoroughly enjoyable journey, it was actually a negative review that spurred me to buy Children of Time. A reader on Kindle, who certainly must be very young (or perhaps hasn't read very widely) inexplicably questioned certain elements of the book. So instead of doing my usual and reading more reviews, I immediately bought it to determine if the criticisms in one negative review were warranted.Oh heavens, those criticisms were absolutely not warranted; instead reflecting a lack of literary awareness. This isn't to say you need any particular literary sensibilities to enjoy this amazing ride, because you don't, but Tchaikovsky weaves throughout the tale many historical references. His commentaries on the social and technological development of a non-human civilization will have the reader naturally reflecting on human social structures and prejudices. Within both the human characters' society and that of the non-human sentients of Kern's World, Tchaikovsky knits themes of civilizational knowledge gained, knowledge lost and knowledge interpolated/extrapolated/jury-rigged in fascinating ways.The long review that baffled me seemed to ridicule the author's choice of the word "classicist," as if it was a strange concept. Good grief! If you don't know a word, look it up! A classicist is a specialist in the study of ancient civilizations. In European-American cultures, what's called the Western tradition, classicists study Ancient Greece and Rome. But if you were a human descendant of an essentially extinct earlier space-faring culture on Earth, you would need scholars in the old languages and old tech of that culture if you wanted to rebuild. You would need classicists, just as much as you'd need classicist scholars to inform you of language, idioms, tools, technology and manners, should you find yourself time-traveling to ancient Rome.By the way, that reader complained the word "classicist" wasn't even in their Kindle dictionary. I had to laugh, since most English words are not in the Kindle dictionary! Just writing this, I had to add the word "eon," among several others, to my Kindle keyboard dictionary. So because it wasn't in their Kindle dictionary, they wondered whether the author, using a "suspect" word, was a native English speaker! I was falling off my proverbial chair on that one. Please reader, avail yourself of a real dictionary, not any device's default keyboard dictionary.Tchaikovsky's use of the names Portia and Fabian (for successive generations of characters on Kern's Planet) was also questioned. I would point the reader to Shakespeare and to British social-political history for the necessary references. And fitting they are. Portia's people are born with the knowledge of their ancestors extant; they don't have to learn old knowledge anew as we do. So successive generations of the daughters of Portia are rightly referred to as Portia. The author comes right out and SAYS "Call her Portia," " Call him Fabian," telling us that yes, this is a descendant of the first brilliant, scientific manipulator Portia; and this the descendant of the brilliant scientist-tactician-social pioneer Fabian. Apparently that reviewer prefers alien-sounding names, yet decided "Portia" and "Fabian" were "weird," (!) simply because THEY didn't know their significance nor purpose. Frankly, the name "Zy-Rak" would have added zero understanding (remember folks, when thinking up dumb-sounding alien names, go heavy on the alveolar sibilants and fricatives, velar stops and, of course, hyphens). The POINT was to use human names with historical attributes as an ingenious way for us dumb primate readers to empathize.The reviewer had a problem imagining a race of civilized arachnids. Imagine that: a Science Fiction fan having a problem with their imagination! Had the author decided to explicate every single scientific development, the book would have been thousands of pages. This is why we extrapolate. This is why we imagine.And the criticism about chapters jumping back and forth from the viewpoints of various characters? Sorry, it's done all the time in countless novels. How else depict concurrent events in the lives of disparate characters in different locations?Their criticism that the characters weren't realistic because they're not depicted eating meals?! What?! I choked when I read that. Left a very bad taste in my mouth. For one thing, the characters' eating IS described. So, what...you wanted... more meals? More importantly, describing eating, per se, is not the mark of literary skill that particular reader seems to think it is. Just because a character might say "I'm famished, that stew smells great," it adds zero to a familiarity of the character. Sure, the author could waste paragraphs on eating functions. But what's the point? It goes without saying, sigh, that we feel hunger and thirst. This eating issue made me think the whole reader review to which I refer was an inside joke. I once read an SF novel in which protagonists were depicted, more than once (as if it had to be hammered home), eating gobs of fake-whipped-cream-festooned sugar-sprinkled, syrup-drenched waffles and pancakes at a restaurant. Believe me, knowing those characters were so clueless (about excessive carbs being detrimental to peak health and cognition) in no way enhanced my understanding. Unless I missed a subtext. Since I never finished that book, perhaps I should revisit to see if the characters died of pancreatic issues before they could further their grand futuristic plans.Also, to their other complaints: "book-lungs" are a known arachnid feature. Look it up. Next, the spider's sentience was due to the nanovirus optimizing development on all fronts, cerebral and biomechanical. Indeed, "known" evolutionary principles did NOT apply. And "self-same" is a common English usage. Look it up. Not on your Kindle dictionary. ("Same-self" does not appear in the book, but self-same does.) Another reviewer complained that "feminism" was being shoved down his throat because the spider females were dominant. As they are on Earth. Why the reader couldn't stretch his imagination far enough to think about how that dominance might play out over centuries of the spiders' social development seems sad. After all, look at all the ways human cultures have found to express male dominance in history in different parts of the world. The novel showed the female spiders making the same short-sighted mistakes and holding onto the same prejudices about the intelligence and "proper place" of their males as have some human males, historically, here on Earth (and are still doing in much of the world). Finally the female spiders wise up, and males are able to contribute more than just their sperm packets, thank God. My heart went out to all the Fabians.It's a shame some readers were unable to get interested in the arachnids' evolution. I found it fascinating. Their wars with the nanovirus-evolved ants were not "endless," whatsoever, not even as endless as this review, just a blip in the beginning. It's also a shame that one reader didn't understand "old man" was a nickname, so if course you saw it a lot. As to complaints the characters weren't fully fleshed out, believe me, the main human protagonist and the others - Lain the engineer, the security head Karst, Commander Guyen - all very different, very defined characters. Lastly, complaints that so much of what happened was as a result of BAD, SELFISH, VIOLENT HUMAN BEHAVIOR? Well, isn't that more or less the same reason our world is so fractured and polluted?Children of Time was such an enjoyable journey; immense, suspenseful, literate, swashbuckling, elegant, illuminating (you get my drift). The mirrors to our present cultures' flaws and grasping for meaning are evident. The author is not saying spiritual seeking or belief is bad; rather that humans - or sentient arachnids - deciding what God is based on a very limited knowledge, or humans trying to speak as God to less evolved forms, is asking for trouble. This novel said nothing that insulted my spiritual beliefs. Those parts discussing religion and the temples were investigations. "Question Authority," but do it quietly at first, research all viewpoints, and make sure to consult fact checkers, lest Authority slap you down.This is a vastly entertaining, thought provoking narrative with no shortage of thrills, spills and science, plus unexpected humor in just the right places, along with referential treats (to wit, paragraph one and the first spaceship mentioned, the Brin 2, presumably after the esteemed science fiction writer-futurist David Brin. Also entertaining, the wry literary and historical references of so many of the chapter names - words from John Gillespie Magee, Horace/Wilfred Owen, and so many more).This book is an inspiring tapestry; just a great read.

Short review: a bold and original idea that deserves praise but ultimately drags on longer than it needs to and becomes hampered by its own story telling structure so that the reader may struggle with caring about anything or anyone.Longer review: Yep, I'm going to be the contrarian ... I know this book has mostly positive review, won an award, whatnot, but ... I just did not like this book all that much. We'll start with the positive, though.The author's narrative style is rich, like better than most. Like, probably in my experience, 75th percentile or so. A lot of the more philosophical meanderings on the author's part is rich with description and intelligence, the likes of which is often hard to come by in a lot of modern literature. For a story that spans literally thousands of years of time and untold light-years of space, this really helps to drum up the gravitas.In addition, the concept here is solid and kind of original: a fragment of humanity struggling to find a new home among the stars but constantly fighting back their own inherent nature, and then when they finally find their Eden, it's already occupied. The details ... are a bit spoiler-ish, so I'll leave it there, but those details further expand things out into some rich, original ideas.All of that said, this novel's biggest failure for me was getting me to CARE.This is a multi-faceted problem. The nature of this story, and the concept of the title is thus: there is no handy faster-than-light travel, no wormholes, no magic gates, just good old fashioned Einstein / Newton physics, so moving between stars takes decades, even centuries. And this is the primary conflict established in this story: that it takes so much damn time to do anything or get anywhere. It's realistic, and it creates a fascinating premise, but it's fractured and ultimately doesn't work well for several reasons. First, the novel follows a model in which the chapters trade off between two perspectives. Then, oftentimes, after a cluster of two chapters, we leap forward in time, decades or even centuries later. The author creates a few characters to follow between the two perspectives, but between the unique problems of the one perspective (which I'll get to later in a somewhat-spoiler-ish riff), and then the nature of the human ark ship and having to traverse centuries and light-years, it's ultimately difficult for any world building or character development to occur (more on this, again, in a spoiler-ish bit later).What's really remarkable is that, despite this book being a massive 600 pages, I ultimately found myself struggling to care much about the characters. The story following the ark ship is pretty straightforward, and centers, more or less, around the experiences of a "classicist" (whatever that means, but basically, a combination historian and an interpreter from the context). For this reason, this character has the most development in terms of monologues and emotional hurdles and whatnot. There's one other character that slowly builds into an interesting concept, but this is hampered by the issues of the narrative going in and out of "suspension" breaks (where the main character goes into cryogenic sleep for decades or centuries at a time). Most other characters that receive a name are entirely forgettable, or just archetypes. So at the end of the novel, there's like maybe 4 or 5 characters you could actually name and describe in any meaningful way. At the end of 600 pages.The nature of the narrative, that of a dying fragment of humanity struggling to live, is timeless and solid and pulls you in (it's literally timeless, because if you read an evolutionary biology book, proto-humans were nearly made extinct by rapidly changing environmental conditions, an element explored in THIS novel to interesting effect). So that's easy to relate too, and it draws some empathy out. But beyond that, the events of this story are just about entirely divorced from any concept of reality as the reader would know or understand it. The bi-perspective chapter trade-off model goes between the humans on a big ark-style spaceship to events on the "Eden-esque" planet. Further, there's really no appreciable discussion of culture or history in this novel. Occasionally a character will make a comment or a thought referencing some real-world concept, theory, or classic literature, but then, because it's so non sequitor, you, the reader, are jolted from the narrative and end up thinking "wait, that would be an absolutely ancient thing to reference at that point ... why does anyone know that or talk about it?" From the historian / interpreter's perspective, we often get high-level diatribes concerning the nature of human history and society, but nothing that's specific to him or real history or even events in the novel (beyond what's necessary to establish a chain of events linking various stages of the story).Ultimately, I reached a point where I was just kind of apathetic about this novel, about 55% or so through. I ended up taking a break and reading through a non-fiction book without coming back to this novel in between, then, realizing I was past the point of returning this purchase, and that it wasn't THAT bad, I slogged through it and was really disappointed by the bizarre and stupidly convenient ending.Now, for further context about this novel and why I didn't like it, there are spoilers. YOU'RE FAIRLY WARNED!*** SPOILERS ***So, the "other" civilization that the traveling humans eventually find are sentient spiders. You get that? Let me say it again. SENTIENT ... SPIDERS. That's who are occupying the planet that everyone is fighting over and that you see pictured on the novel's cover and that the human ark ship is trying to inhabit.When I started the novel (and no further spoilers about the details here), I thought that the other civilization would be just another colony of humans. I thought, given the context and the synopsis and other things, that it would be a simple case of a big galaxy civilization collapsing entirely, and these groups of peoples are separated for millennia, so they eventually become entirely different and unique cultures, maybe even biologically diverge a bit ... but no, it's SPIDERS. EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS. Ultimately, there's more to it than that, but that's the most important thing you need to know: this other culture that the humans encounter are neither human, nor alien, nor even mammals. So ... going back to the comment I made about the difficulty with one of the perspectives ... yeah, this is the 2nd perspective; every other chapter is from the point of view of the spider society. So beyond the obvious problems involved with trying to get a human reader to think from the perspective of an invertebrate arthropod, and what's more, one that like 90% of humans hate, there's the issues of trying to IMAGINE a spider society and then get a human reader to care about it. Further, the spiders will obviously not use human names, but then, apparently, dumbly, the author didn't even try to come up with spider-centric names. I kid you not, the author introduces 4 names to use during the spider chapters ... Portia, Fabian, Bianca, Vivian. Human names, but used by the author-narrator entirely as a labeling convenience, and not because that's anything like how the spiders refer to themselves. The author didn't even bother to fall back on a Native American style naming convention, like "She Who Treads Softly" or "Swift-Hunter". Shit, the author could have done a thing where they were like "among the spiders, this one is known by a moniker that roughly translates as 'Swift Hunter', or, for convenience, Swift". So using obviously human names (and weird names at that) breaks the narrative style and is jarring. But even weirder, the author refers to each successive generation of spider-character by that same name. On one level, I understood the idea: "this spider is a direct descendent of the last one we followed a century before". But on the other hand, each of these spiders, realistically, embodied a different personality at times and behaved different from their ancestor. So now here you are using the same character names for clearly different characters ... it was confusing at times, is what I'm saying.And then there's a lot of little mechanical, technical gripes I have about the novel that collectively warrants maybe a full star reduction.First, I don't know if English is a second language to the author, or this was translated, or if I'm just dumb, but not infrequently, the author uses the same bizarre words in describing something without ever giving clarification as to why that word is being used. For example, "classicist". My Kindle doesn't know that word. And I've never seen it. Or "book-lungs". He kept saying the spiders have "book-lungs". How these are different from normal lungs is never explained. Or "same-self". And probably a dozen other words used less often, but you get the idea. It got confusing and frustrating.Second, I'll leave the details about why this second civilization on an Eden world is one of spiders, but in general, the concept that spiders could evolve to a point of sentience roughly equivalent to humans is a bit bizarre and ultimately just too hard to swallow. This is for a multitude of reasons that, anyone who has a passing understanding of evolutionary biology, will understand. Spiders are invertebrates and have exoskeletons. The reason these animals (insects, other crawlies, etc) never got very large was due to the inherent biological limitations in this design. The largest bugs known to exist were with the dinosaurs (6 foot wingspan dragonflies), and they never came back because the atmosphere had a lot more oxygen back then (also why the dinosaurs existed). This is somewhat vaguely addressed in the novel, though, so ... okay, that one can fly. But also, exoskeletons are heavy. The way physics works at the level of an ant or a spider is entirely different from how it works with a human or a dog (which is roughly how large these spiders are supposed to be). I'm no scientist or mathematician, and thus, I couldn't spit the formulas at you, but it's something like an exponential increase in amount of energy necessary to perform an action as an animal gets larger. So an ant can lift 5 times it's body weight ... because of how physics works at that level, and the fact it spends very little energy moving its body. But a human can lift a bare fraction of its own body weight (unless your bodybuilding freak) because we spend so much of that energy just holding our body UP, AND THEN ALSO lifting that ARM up to lift the object. So the other reason giant bugs and spiders do not exist is because the concept of exoskeletons eventually reached a point of such vastly diminishing returns that it caused things to plateau. Evolution on Earth clearly demonstrates (through reptiles, fish, birds, and mammals) that having no spine and no endoskeleton proved less advantageous, especially on land and in the air. Next, there's the critical computing mass problem ... outside of mammals, the reason so few animals on earth exhibit anything approaching sentience is because they don't have enough neurons in their head. Parrots and octopi are an exception to this, but even then, they still just are not nearly as aware as dolphins, elephants or primates, all of whom have large brains (obviously, interconnectedness of the neurons plays a very big part in that, but that still requires a certain level of sheer neuronal density / size that is mostly a waste of calories in all other non-mammals). And since these spiders have 8 legs, a heavy exoskeleton, and are only a meter or two in size, apparently haven't mastered cooking or omnivorous behavior, it's questionable as to whether they'd be able to spend enough calories and nutrients on having a big brain.Beyond the questions of biological feasibility, there's just a huge question of how a species that has gut-liquefying venom and builds everything out of silk and doesn't have hands ... in other words, how a species with so little need to improvise and adapt could become sentient. The novel sets up a situation that more or less hand waves this (and this concept eventually and predictably reaches a point of absurdity), but still: the idea is that these spiders are still more or less following the rules of evolution, but at an accelerated pace and in a gently guided way. Keep in mind that humans are really wimpy when you consider us at a purely bio-mechanical perspective. And perhaps because of that very fact, we became sentient because we had to improvise and overcome and find ways to get around the glacial pace of evolution. Adversity is the mother of all invention (and evolution).Finally, going back to some of my original complaints, this novel is weirdly light on the details. I say weirdly because the author constantly starts to approach various topics with a spray of techno-babble and jargon and exposition ... and then just swerves away and leaves the specifics to your imagination. It's because of this constant back-and-forth of "details ... now no details. Details ... now no more details" that this is irritating and frustrating. Had the author approached everything from a high-level overview perspective and pushed the story largely through events and story-telling concepts, it would have been fine. Had he committed to developing a "hard sci-fi" with lots of jargon and science, would have been great. But beyond this mix of light fiction and technical fiction, there's a lot of little societal details that are missing if you stop to think about it. For example, no one ever eats. If you read this review and still read the book ... keep this in mind. NO ONE EVER EATS. Sure, there's the occasional obligatory "this person ate over this span of time", and of course, given the nature of how spiders eat, we see that explored quite a bit, but there's no CEREMONY to it. There's no "boy I'm hungry for a steak!" kind of chatter. There's exactly ONE scene of two people eating, and yet STILL there's no description of what it is they ate, just "the slop that was on board the station". Was it good?? Was it bad?? Was it oatmeal?? Roast duck?? A formless muck generated by some magical machine?? How about drinking? NO ONE EVER DRINKS. Ever. Not even the spiders. What about cultural references? What about entertainment? NOTHING. And I think that's part of why I could never really come to care about any character, human or otherwise. They're just humans in a vacuum (metaphorical here, not literal, which is also true in this story). They're completely detached from any semblance of society or personal hopes or joys or desires. Not even the spiders have culture. There's loose talk about artists, and some spiders at one point make a sculpture of silk (of course), but no discussion of how that fits into a wider society. Literally one of the first things that marks out humans in ancient history (from the apes that came before) was art. It's always art. Not tools (birds and other non-mammals use tools), not math, not writing, but ART. And that is just weirdly lacking in this story for a novel that explores, in large part, what it is to be human and what's worth fighting for. Of course, there's lots of other less important details that are missing (the spider planet is, by description, apparently only populated by spiders, one beetle species, a species of shrimp, mice, ants, and, namelessly, a few other insects, but nothing else. WHERE IS THE ENTIRE REST OF THIS ECOSYSTEM?).

I bought this book (and several others) in a bit of a rush as holiday reads, and I've learnt several things from doing just that.1- Just because Amazon has been recommending this book to me for several months does not make it a good book.2- Having an award mentioning Arthur C Clarke does not make it a good book.3- Viewer ratings mean nothing, including mine.This book is boring, repetitive and ultimately unimaginative. I've managed to persist to the end but even so I can't bring myself to give it more than one star. In the future I'll stick to my normal methods of choosing books and write this one off.

Really enjoyed this. With detailed and fascinating world-building and a fantastically well-drawn 'alien' perspective (and an AI viewpoint thrown in for good measure), it's long, takes its own time to get to a satisfying and surprising conclusion and I found it utterly satisfying. The freshest piece of hard sci-fi I've read in years. It's got spaceships, terraforming, conflict, suspended animation, lots of time passing and characters that you build a relationship with, despite their many unsympathetic actions. It's driven by the parallel urges to survival of at least 2 (possibly 3) different cultures/species. You may find your own allegiance shifts as you read on, as first one, then another inspires your sympathy and support. As a result, it retains your interest. One reason I kept reading was to find out who I would end up rooting for - it was impossible to know. Adrian Tchaikovsky writes good prose, with a nice line in wry observations and pithy summings-up of the worst aspects of human behaviour. Now I've read this and Spiderlight (also highly recommended), I shall explore his other work.

Quite simply a stunning piece of work. I'm a fussy reader and have struggled to find anything to compare with the best of Asimov, Clarke, Bear and Bradbury (etc), but this book was the first I've read in a long time that I couldn't wait to get back to between reading sessions.Who'd have thought it possible to conceive of a civilisation of spiders that feels entirely realistic in its construction and how it evolves over time? By sensitive, imaginative writing and the clever trick of reusing names, the author allows the reader to identify with arachnid characters across the centuries. In the counterpoint story, we follow a human "classicist" who is periodically awakened from suspended animation and who acts as our witness to the unravelling of society on the ark ship.Absolutely superb from first to last with (to me) a surprising ending that was pretty satisfying. Well played indeed, Adrian.

This was recommended to me by a friend who also loves science fiction and after seeing all the positive reviews and awards I took a punt on it and at first I was hooked. Children of Time is set in the far future where humanity has colonies across many moons and planets and is spreading out. As part of an experiment one particular world is having monkeys put onto the planet along with an engineered virus to speed up their evolution. There are many arguments about this particular line of experimentation as well as the direction of the human race leading to a civil war that disrupts the experiment. The monkeys never make it to the planet, the virus however does and instead effects the other species on the planet to various effects, especially the spiders.The idea frankly is fantastic and the developing spider culture is pretty interesting. The problem is that the book is so incredibly slow yet manages to barely develop any of it's characters which is a remarkable feat to me. It spends it's time jumping between a family line of spiders all with the same name through time and a group of human refugees looking for a new home but I found it difficult to summon any interest in them. The humans never get any real development beyond superficial descriptions and interests and while the spider narrative is really interesting it never sticks with any of them long enough to form any attachments to any of them. I want a cast I can either root for or maybe even hate but Children of Time manages to make me just not care.I got 33% of the way through and realised two things, nothing had really happened in 200 pages and that I was intentionally finding excuses not to read it. All in all I can see why people would enjoy it, the idea is excellent but it's just too slow and the characters are far too under developed for my taste. Perhaps it gets much better and I have given up prematurely but I didn't want to force myself through when I have so many other books to read.+ Fantastic premise.+ Spider culture is interesting.- Characters are forgettable or don't have enough focus.- Takes too long to actually get anywhere.

Definitely sci-fi, but good sci-fi. And this is coming from someone who definitely dislikes the This-Is-How-It-Works-In-Ten-Pages-Of-Detail that seems to plague so many of the classics. I did find it slightly heavy going (and tended to read in chapter-sized chunks) but the payoff is absolutely worth it.It’s a story of genetics and modification and evolution, but it’s also characters. It’s humanity’s last rag-bag of peoples who have clawed their way up through the ruins of our civilisation, and done the best they can with the remnants of technology to leave a dying Earth. But when the ship Gilgamesh, carrying its cargo of humanity, reaches their best hope, they find it’s occupied – and the sentinel does not want them to land.And down on the terraformed planet, the experiment to produce a new space-faring race is progressing – species rise and clash, adapting and moulding to their environment, facing challenges that are both similar and unexpected to humanity’s journey. But over two thousand years, what rises to meets its test isn’t what the sentinel expected.The two strands wind nicely; the evolution of life on the planet jumps forward, generation by generation, but I loved that the names stay the same to keep a sense of continuity. And up on the Gilgamesh, it’s the same names, coming in and out of deep-sleep over the course of time. The character’s stories are as fascinating and enthralling as the technology is, and I absolutely love the part-alien, part-familiar mindset of the planetside civilisation.And that mindset, for me, is what makes this book absolutely worthwhile – the final twist is brilliant. It’s a story of challenge and technology and people and civilisations, and it’s definitely worth reading.