hardcover, 608 pages
English language
Published May 31, 2015 by Tor.
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 …
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?
Content warning too many legs
What a cool ride. I did not expect to have the giant spiders to end up as the bosses at the end!
I tried, I really did. It had some interesting concepts but I felt it's pacing was all wrong from the kind of story it was trying to tell and as such became a chore to read.
Una storia di scienza e tecnologia da una prospettiva completamente inaspettata. Un ragionamento molto interessante sul linguaggio e sulla terraformazione.
This was extremely good. Dunno why it took me a really long time to read... i kinda stalled out really hard halfway through but I suspect it was unrelated to the book itself and more just me. The end was really fun. I wasn't planning to read the sequel but I think I will now?
Schwer zu bewerten. Es gibt zwei parallele Handlungen von denen die Eine - die Menschen - gar nichts taugt. Derartiges gab's schon zig mal in den letzten 60 Jahren Sci-Fi - und davon viele auch deutlich durchdachter. Bleibt die Geschichte der Spinnen - Im Großen und Ganzen auch recht vorhersehbar, aber es gibt da einen Aspekt der wieder für Vieles entschädigt: Die Spinnen-Technologie.
I was, and still am, extremely ambivalent about this piece of literature. I'll list its minuses first.
'Children of Time' is a book written like an anecdote out of Max Fisher's Capitalist Realism. Tchaikovsky view of humans is that we're living on - to borrow Murray Bookchin's terminology - a 'stingy' planet (or rather, a stingy universe!), that we're all naturely extremely destructive, sheeple fighting each other mindlessly, and that humanity will only be saved by benevolent genius nerds (aka tech daddies). It's really sci-fi that's reflective of current mainstream ideology. It doesn't help us imagine any new future. But - that is not to say this book has no merits. It's a very well-written book. It's fun to read. It has tons of suspence, and it's hard to lay down. I enjoyed it, but I didn't enjoy enjoying it. In conclusion: decent book, fun, but also depressing and annoying.
I loved the idea of this story, the last remnants of the human race travelling across space looking for a new home because "surprise surprise" we managed to cock-up Earth. They discover a new home but not all is as expected. The story follows two groups, first there are the humans protecting their cargo and fighting amongst themselves and then you have the occupants of the planet watching them evolve and making similar mistakes to humans during their evolution.
Now for the bits that annoyed me, first the narrator, I couldn't get my head around if there was a narrator or we were hearing the thoughts of the beings on the planet, it seemed to jump between the two which was rather annoying, why would human words be used, for example there was a plague which was called....a plague. The technology was another issue for me, sometimes things would be …
I loved the idea of this story, the last remnants of the human race travelling across space looking for a new home because "surprise surprise" we managed to cock-up Earth. They discover a new home but not all is as expected. The story follows two groups, first there are the humans protecting their cargo and fighting amongst themselves and then you have the occupants of the planet watching them evolve and making similar mistakes to humans during their evolution.
Now for the bits that annoyed me, first the narrator, I couldn't get my head around if there was a narrator or we were hearing the thoughts of the beings on the planet, it seemed to jump between the two which was rather annoying, why would human words be used, for example there was a plague which was called....a plague. The technology was another issue for me, sometimes things would be explained and the ideas would be really inventive and then at other times you're just left hanging, I did stop reading the book for a few weeks when I got annoyed that the reader just had to accept that communication between the planet and an object in space was possible, yes I know I'm sad.
I wish I could have enjoyed this like so many others have but it just wasn't to be. I see there is a sequel and this book was good enough to have me intrigued to see what is next in this saga.
Blog review: felcherman.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/children-of-time-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/
Is the human race worth preserving? I go back and forth on this one. When I read [b:The Three-Body Problem|20518872|The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1)|Liu Cixin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415428227l/20518872.SY75.jpg|25696480] I sided with the invading aliens. In this book, chapters alternate between sides and I sided with each alternately but I was not excited about how the humans turned out after centuries of humanness. Ms. Kern was probably right to wish a do over though I'm not clear how this nanovirus can do all the tricks claimed for it. Hard to see a virus as the good guys during a pandemic.
But if evolution is really just trial and error, I can't see how you can speed that up significantly. And then these viruses become some way of recognizing kinship, but the humans already had that when they started and you can see how they turned out.
So, some interesting …
Is the human race worth preserving? I go back and forth on this one. When I read [b:The Three-Body Problem|20518872|The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1)|Liu Cixin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415428227l/20518872.SY75.jpg|25696480] I sided with the invading aliens. In this book, chapters alternate between sides and I sided with each alternately but I was not excited about how the humans turned out after centuries of humanness. Ms. Kern was probably right to wish a do over though I'm not clear how this nanovirus can do all the tricks claimed for it. Hard to see a virus as the good guys during a pandemic.
But if evolution is really just trial and error, I can't see how you can speed that up significantly. And then these viruses become some way of recognizing kinship, but the humans already had that when they started and you can see how they turned out.
So, some interesting ideas with the ants and the chemicals and the alternate technologies but underneath the usual themes, even if done better than the average space opera.
The humans got to live a long time by sleeping through most of it, but the spiders, instead of living a long time just had the same names as their ancestors? And we readers just treat them as if they're the same spiders they're named after. It kinda worked but I think it's weird.
3.5 stars rounded up to 4 because it ended better than it could have (though it really was too long).
This would had been four stars if the build-up wasn't as long.
DNF at 30%. At first it has a 70's SF feel and I was kind of enjoying it in a retro way, but the seams began to show. Inconsistencies, cardboard characters, incorrect science (most species of ants are not blind, for one). But mostly, I kept thinking about the other book I'd rather have been reading. The one with the intelligent spiders on the planet, and the humans in space in desperate straits. The one where I cared about all the characters, and the writing was good. The one with this paragraph in it:
It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet …
DNF at 30%. At first it has a 70's SF feel and I was kind of enjoying it in a retro way, but the seams began to show. Inconsistencies, cardboard characters, incorrect science (most species of ants are not blind, for one). But mostly, I kept thinking about the other book I'd rather have been reading. The one with the intelligent spiders on the planet, and the humans in space in desperate straits. The one where I cared about all the characters, and the writing was good. The one with this paragraph in it:
It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It’s a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax,
postpone. It’s the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.
Yeah, skip this one and read Vinge's A Deepness In the Sky. If you've read it before, reread it, and you'll still find a lot more than you'll likely find here.
Very clever use of time to unsettle us with an other and alien confrontation. The two threads of story are well-balanced and subtly contorted my sympathies as this long-but-didn't-feel-too-long novel unwound.
Despairingly cynical and utterly naive.
Astonishingly good sf that reverses many conventional tropes into stellar, scintillating form.
