Children of Time

great science fiction!

The author has a knack for great (and often hilarious) writing. It's surprising to read a great story that was written so recently. I did expect more from the story progression but then there's book 2 and 3 as well. This book is smart, has a number of interesting sci fi ideas and themes.

Interesting, well written and some nice ideas, but for me, wow, a long read that seemingly never ended.

What if, instead of monekys evolving, another creature evolved to reach our levels of self awareness? What if that creature were spiders? Well, this book will give you a good run for your money.

Split, mostly, between a new civilization of sentient spiders and a space ark containing (what we presume) the last cargo of earthlings, the story tells itself over centuries, if not millennia (it's not really clear - just enough time for spiders to become astronauts!).

On one side the story looks at an evolving species and dips in and out of time to see how they're getting on, how science evolves, how society evolves and most interestingly, struggles to break free of their DNA wiring.

On the other side, floating away in space a space ark ship, run by “key crew” and carrying a cargo of the last dollop of humanity. Space sleep, stasis, what have you, is used to let the characters jump over centuries of time, and start to slip out of sync of eachother's ages.

The responsibility of carry the last of humanity and even the sheer amount of time on a ship that was perhaps designed for shipping and not generations of the living are examined, and this is certainly interesting.

The book, at 600 odd pages though, for me, took me a long, long time to get through. 2 months in fact. I found it really hard to feel any kind of connection with the spider society and evolution which probably dragged my reading along.

I loved Dogs of War by the same author, and I legally remember it being quite epic. But with this book, it was beyond epic and around the 60% mark I was just wanting it to end.

The end of the book does close off with some really nice and aspirational ideas, but for me, this just too long to get to and fell short of what felt like work to finish the book.

Recommended if you like your space operas. Possibly pass if you're unsure. I'm not sure I'll be quick to pick up another book that spans an epic time period for a while!

One of the best books I've ever read. When it comes to science fiction, there's a lot of the same out there. Tchaikovsky writes an entirely original story with amazing characters - not all human.

The premise is this: Earth is in the process of terraforming a new planet to make it habitable. The plan is to contaminate this new world with a genetic virus that will cause the monkies there to become more sentient in the far future. Something goes wrong (we're still in chapter 1 here) and instead a planet of insects are grown.

The most impressive part of this entire story is the focus on insect chemistry and what it would look like for a planet of intelligent spiders to rise. They face many of the same issues we do in our society today - gender rights (although the main issue is to allow males to NOT be eaten after mating), societal structures, trust, communication and math. The approach to solving these issues is entirely insect based, and some of them blew my mind.

Earth is dust, humans are looking for new planets to settle. Generation ships travelling for thousands of years, genetically engineered spiders, failed terraformed planets, first contact, a look into an alien society evolving through the years. Even though there are wars and the classic conflicts for power, I liked the optimistic ending.??

There were a lot of things I liked about this book. For me the thing that held me back from really enjoying it was that I felt no connection to the characters. Or well.... I did, or I would start to... and then it would be like hundreds of years later and thus new characters (kind of) and then repeat. I get that the name is children of time but do we really need to time jump 10 times?? I also really do not like spiders... BUT... surprisingly those were the characters I enjoyed the most, or that version of them but then poof...different reincarnated spiders. I don't know.. I really did want to like this and it just left me feeling hungry still, but not hungry for the next book, more like that meal was not satisfying so lets order pizza when we get home.

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.