Genre: Science Fiction Published: Orbit, June 2015 My Rating: 3/5 stars
“This will be the first of a thousand worlds that we will give life to. For we are gods, and we are lonely, so we shall create.”
Before I’m skewered on multiple pitchforks for rating this book anything lower than a 5-star; please hear me out. This is my rating, largely based off my enjoyment and click with the book. Children of Time is one of those examples where that subjective opinion is wildly different from my “objective thoughts” on the quality of the book.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of my favourite sci-fi authors working to date, and I still recommend this novel, despite it being one of my least favourite of his works.
Story:
Humanity has left a dying Earth behind, and embarked on a terraforming journey to the stars. Millenia before, a desperate plan was set in motion; setting loose groups of monkeys infected with a nanovirus to accelerate their evolution on inhabitable planets. By the time the last remnants of the human race arrive after escaping an unhabitable earth, they might arrive on an already terraformed planet with a society of humans having evolved separately from ours.
When the crew of the Gilgamesh arrives on one such planet, they find their experiment has been a success; an evolved society is present there, completely alien and superior to us in many ways. Only it didn’t come from the monkeys… it came from an unintentional eight-legged stowaway aboard the original ship…
What I loved:
Tchaikovsky belongs along the modern masters of hard-sci-fi for his creativity in the science of his choice; biology. In all of his works, his concepts are rooted in real biology, but taken to a creative “what-if”-place. In this case "what if arachnids took an evolutionary path parallel to monkeys/humans" wasn’t a question I knew I wanted an answer to, until Tchaikovsky gave it to me. Suspension of disbelieve is made so much easier when the story has such a strong root in familiar science and the author has such grasp on his subject matter.
9/10 on worldbuilding; from the biology to the alien society and the way it would logically differ from ours, since it came from a completely different source-species.
What I didn’t love:
I’m a very character-driven reader, so space opera’s that span millennia and multiple generations are often something I struggle with. That played a part here too. The large cast of characters, none of which felt truly unique or memorable to me, kept me at a distance and the fact that half of them are sentient spiders didn’t help for the arachnophobe in me . One of my favourite aspects of Tchaikovsky’s character (e.g. in Cage of Souls and Alien Clay) is the ease of voice and the occasional cynical humor his protagonist tend to have. That playful bit of humor was missing for me here.
Then there’s the length; 600 pages might not be too long for a space-opera, but I felt the length… Around the midpoint, things become very repetitive and we visit the same issues in different forms multiple times. It felt like the author tried to made sure we got the themes by repeating them, whilst they were already quite clear the first time round.
Overall, although I loved the worldbuilding, the story inside the world began to drag for me, and I felt my mind wonder off at times.
I still feel like it’s an easy book to recommend to fans of the genre, and I don’t regret picking it up for a second. However; I can’t say im not a little bummed that the most popular book by one of my favourite authors happened to not be my favourite of his works.
Find this book here on Goodreads.
