Children of Time

Set across thousands of years, it nevertheless reads through without feeling stretched. It follows two threads. The first is the story of uplifting a species. The second is the far-off descendants of those who started the uplift. Themes of the nature of humanity and the drive for survival.

As a life-long arachnophobe, Tchaikovsy did something I honestly never thought could happen. He made me pull for an arachnid species. He wrote them in such an empathetic way. He had me rooting for them and their species. If the movie is ever made, though, I'm NOT going to see it.

I liked the parallels he maintained between the two story lines. And I really enjoyed the gender flip on oppression for the spiders. Of course the male spiders were lower ranked in society. It was a bit heavy-handed at times, but maybe that'll just help men who don't get it now see it.

Very intriguing story and great world-building on the green planet. I was really fascinated by the cities and technologies made from silk.

But I never felt too much sympathy with the protagonists, because they either only came up for a short period and then disappeared in time, repeating the same names (Portia) for different characters didn't help. Or because they were not very likeable. There was hardly any backstory on the crew of the ship, and emotional storylines like the relationship of classicist and engineer were rather subdued, never made it into my heart. The storyline was foreseeable in many parts, even the rather abrupt ending. I found myself skipping lines and paragraphs towards the end.

This may sound negative, and honestly, the book leaves me somehow unsatisfied, even though I can't point out a singular reason. Nevertheless, I would recommend reading it, it's entertaining and gripping in most parts, and as said before, the world-building is full of original, great ideas.

I read a Peter F Hamilton book years ago where the story we had been following stopped abruptly and we had a long section explaining the way an alien species developed, dominated its home planet and took to the stars. It was a fun, interesting part, but narratively it was very strange: the story came to a screeching halt while we caught up with what the baddies are up to. I can't remember the name of the book, and I can't be bothered digging it out because it's not like I really recommend reading it anyway...

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time feels like that concept, but executed significantly more cleverly. The story flits back and forth between the human story and the story of the other species. And the other species are made a lot more interesting and sympathetic than in the Hamilton book.

My one gripe with the book is that the characters are not particularly well fleshed out. It's a book very much focused on the grand story of the fate of humanity, rather than on the specific humans it follows, and so those humans are just plot devices, really.