Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky Book Review
The first book of an epic space opera trilogy.
Humanity is failing. But thanks to the Ancients, a new race will inherit the universe. Or can mankind make one last desperate act of survival and undo what was denied to them. Living on a green planet.
A race of spiders, infected with a virus that will bring about a evolutionary revolution. Thousands of years of uninterrupted growth as they develop consciousness, reason, and religion. Their God, in the heavens above them, encouraging them to make the breakthrough that allows them to contact her. A contact that is needed, because the danger that is approaching will wipe them out before they reach their full potential, if the proper steps aren’t taken.
This is a long novel. 600 pages. It covers several thousand years. A prologue that sets up the whole thing, followed by the advancing of the spiders and the travel through space of the humans that survived the world ending war over Earth. It is a fast paced read. There is rarely any times that the novel drags. Tchaikovsky is brilliant in creating conflicts so that you, as the reader, never gets bored.
Get Joe Kendall’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The spiders are interesting. Tchaikovsky spends a lot of time explaining how a spider could evolve to become an intelligent species. He also does a fantastic job of making them different from humans. Their culture that is developed is foreign enough from anything we have ever seen, but believable enough that we could believe it. Again, a lot of time is spent with how spiders behave here on Earth, and how that would translate to them being the dominant species.
The humans are a little less interesting. We follow Holsten, a classicist. He is basically a historian and linguist of the ancient humans. The people that were super smart space travelers, but had wiped themselves out and destroyed the world in massive, unmitigated war. Holsten is part of the “Key Crew” in that they need him to translate any old technology they may find. Others in the Key Crew are the ships captain, security officer, chief scientist, and chief engineer. Only Lain, the engineer gets any real depth, her being Holsten’s fling/girl friend. The rest become caricatures and portrayed as either crazy, or kind of one dimensionally stupid.
You can tell that Tchaikovsky loved his spider characters. He explored deeply each one as they were introduced over time. And the characters of the same name, ancestors of older generations, had key components connecting them, but were still individualized. The humans stay the same. They go back into deep-freeze storage between scenes, and thawed out at the next point of conflict. It explains why there is so little growth of the characters, and how they survive for thousands of years. Though you never know exactly how much time has passed between each scene. That can be annoying.
Jumping to the end, the last battle scene does have a lot to be desired. The resolution felt unsatisfying. Like there are a lot of questions of acceptance and speed to be asked. The complete changing of human thinking felt cheap and too easy. And Holsten and Lain never really took charge. They continued to let things happen to them. The spiders ignoring Kern, their God and creator, was good. Again, you can tell that Tchaikovsky loved writing that part of the story. Finding a different solution that didn’t involve the wiping out of another intelligent species was a good one. It just felt rushed, even after 600 pages of setup.
I think my biggest problem with the humans is that, I wanted something more like Star Trek the Original or Next Gen. What we got is Star Trek Discovery. Where the captain was kind of like Khan, his personality is never explored enough to justify his actions. Karst is just an idiot. And the whole time, people are insubordinate and doing whatever they want throughout the mission. I get wanting to create tension, but often if felt unprofessional. These are supposed to humanities last people. And making them into nothing but power-hungry, petty, war-mongers was a bit much. Holsten was supposed to be the voice of reason, but he never once spoke up. Lain could have been a Kirk or even a Riker given a little more story. The science engineer, who had almost no screen time until the very end, could have been better fleshed out and become a Spock or Data.
Don’t think that these complaints ruin the story. It is a good book. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I just hoped for more. Tchaikovsky has a fascinating mind. How does someone come up with this sort of thing. It is truly a wonderful world. There are just some areas that could have been better is all. I gave this a 4 out of 5 stars because of the humans came off flatter than I would have liked and the ending was a bit rushed. I am looking forward to reading the next two books. I want to see where this world goes. What happened to the other two generation ships. And how does this new symbiosis work out. Do the spiders and humans truly live in harmony, or do they still end up fracturing and destroying each other. Or does Kern try to retake her dominance and destroy what she had made.
A lot of possibilities. And the next two books are also in the 600 page realm. So lots of world to explore.
