Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time tackles world-building, a dying earth and humans as a multi-planetary species, evolution, religion, development of science, inter-species' war, pandemics, exploration and so on. The story traces a series of prime-moving spiders (all nicknamed Portia), who are at the forefront of the species, whether it is tackling the horde of ants, or battling a pandemic. They are warriors, explorers, scientists, adventurers etc. Playing second fiddle to the Portias are Biancas and Fabians, who are warriors, scientists, rebels in their own right.
In mankind's quest to find another suitable home after destroying Earth, the plan is to terraform another planet, drop apes along with a virus that will jump start their evolution into humans. However the apes don't make landfall alive on account of political turmoil at the time of their launch, instead spiders are infected with the virus. A single surviving scientist mans an orbiting spaceship with the help of AI, and lives for centuries and millennia using cryogenic sleep tech. However the scientist - one Avrana Kern, believes it is apes that are evolving on 'Kern's World' - her nickname for the terraformed planet.
Humans, on the other hand seemed to have passed their golden age of scientific technology, however they still have enough knowledge and resources to become a space-faring people. Earth, having been devasted by ecological disasters and climate change is uninhabitable. Humans have taken to gargantuan spaceships called Arks, and they search the universe for habitable worlds to start over on. One such Ark called the Gilgamesh, commandeered by Guyen stumbles upon the then ancient Kern's World, however Kern (who is now a very cool & powerful human-AI centaur) in her orbiting spaceship doesn't want anyone disturbing her supposed project - guiding apes to once again evolve into humans, utterly clueless that it is spiders who are evolving.
Its tough to recommend this book, if you're pressed for time. The sci-fi isn't deep enough, and the world-building is shallow and linear. Lot's of name dropping follows...
In Children of Time mankind is responsible for the cataclysmic destruction of Earth. Man is no longer focused on scientific progress, and his foremost interest lies in escape and survival, living to fight another day. Compare this with other tales of humans as multi-planetary species like Isaac Asimov's Foundation - where human civilization is already multi-planetary, but faces political and social destruction. Also see Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, where mankind must abandon Earth because the moon has disintegrated and made Earth uninhabitable because of the destruction of the atmosphere. Or Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem.
Children of Time reads like a discount fictionalisation of Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens - touching on subjects like science versus religion, the evolution of physiology, war and culture clashes and other big-science topics, but world building never goes deep enough to grip the reader, specially one already exposed to popular science books like those of Yuval Noah Harari, Jared Diamond, Desmond Morris etc. The development of spiders and ants as a civilization isn't that deep either, and isn't as impressive as Iain M. Banks Culture civilization or the Dwellers from The Algebraist. Further, the relationship between the ants and spiders could have been more nuanced, like the symbiotic relation between the two dominant alien species on Rakhat in Mary Doria Russel's The Sparrow.
Scientific concepts offer nothing new, with concepts like time dilation, cryogenic sleep etc already made popular by Interstellar, Demolition Man, The Forever War etc. The science versus religion angle is dominated from themes of the Catholic Church versus Galileo from Europe's dark ages.
Given that this review is a minority view compared to the excellent rating Children of time has on GoodReads, and in general - the book is probably a decent entry point to the science fiction genre. Avoid it if you aren't curious about it, and if you've read the type of books mentioned above.
