Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky – Review

Published: June 4, 2015

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Series: Standalone

Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: 600 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 4.5/5.0

Synopsis:

A race for survival among the stars… Humanity’s last survivors escaped earth’s ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers?

WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age – a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind’s worst nightmare.

Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

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SPIDERS.

SPIDER PLANET.

THERE IS A PLANET FULL OF SENTIENT SPIDERS.

THEY HAVE A LEGIT SOCIETY, WITH RELIGION, TECHNOLOGY, WAR, CULTURE, EVERYTHING.

I LOVED THEM AND I DON’T LIKE SPIDERS.

Oh yeah, there are also humans who occasionally wake up from deep cryo-sleep and they blast around the universe searching for habitable planets, because Earth was destroyed and they’re the last humans.

But really, who cares about their petty dramas when we can have a multi-generational spider-verse that’s way cooler than many other ”unique” societies in sci-fi and fantasy books?

In all reality, the human POVs in this book are for the most part very interesting as well, but for vastly different reasons. These humans are on a giant colony ship that is headed towards the spider planet (Kernsworld) in hopes of finding a habitable planet for the scraggly remnants of the human species. What they don’t expect to find is a highly territorial and definitely insane AI/human nightmare that wants nothing more than to blast them to smithereens to prevent any corruption of this experimental world. They reach an impasse and the humans carry on towards another planet only to come full circle in the end. This portion follows a fairly standard plot with some exciting additions like mutiny, religious cults, and wannabe immortals.

The spiders are way cooler. This book follows them from the introduction of a virus that causes them to evolve at an unnaturally rapid pace through to a highly advanced state. The fact that you can go along with their species and society evolving is what makes this portion so darn fascinating. I loved it! There’s warfare against the ants, plague, religious factions… basically it’s a world history, but it zeroes in on a few select spideys in each generation, all of which are descendants of the first spiders to have acquired the virus.

Children of Time is only my second Adrian Tchaikovsky book and it’s so vastly different from the other that I can’t begin to compare them. Needless to say, he has a way to make you feel for characters and high quality writing to boot. I’ve got a third book by him queued up for the near future and can’t wait to see how that compares!