paperback, 608 pages
Published June 4, 2015 by Tor.
Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.
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.
One of the best scifi and books I have ever read. Can't wait to read the next one.
Frustratingly well executed but somewhat irritating. Tchaikovsky weaves two tales together, one about a post-apocalyptic ark ship that outlives its expected lifetime and another about a civilization of spiders infected with a magic virus that makes them evolve quickly and be more empathetic. All of this is interesting, well structured, makes good use of contrast and variation on themes, is everything you could expect of modern sci-fi.
My complaints are a bunch of annoyances that take the shine off the whole thing. Chief among them is the main human PoV character who is a humanities professor surrounded by STEM and executive types who blunders his way from one catastrophe to another apparently knowing better than the rest of the cast but doing precious little with his wisdom over the course of Portal millennia. The human cast are a bunch of bad stereotypes and you could have cut half that half …
Frustratingly well executed but somewhat irritating. Tchaikovsky weaves two tales together, one about a post-apocalyptic ark ship that outlives its expected lifetime and another about a civilization of spiders infected with a magic virus that makes them evolve quickly and be more empathetic. All of this is interesting, well structured, makes good use of contrast and variation on themes, is everything you could expect of modern sci-fi.
My complaints are a bunch of annoyances that take the shine off the whole thing. Chief among them is the main human PoV character who is a humanities professor surrounded by STEM and executive types who blunders his way from one catastrophe to another apparently knowing better than the rest of the cast but doing precious little with his wisdom over the course of Portal millennia. The human cast are a bunch of bad stereotypes and you could have cut half that half of the book and had something far less frustrating.
The spider's history is far more compelling but beyond a few analogies for (mostly Western European) history I didn't really feel like the cultural or political implications of the society he outlines were explored at any depth. I don't mind the conclusion but there is no real questioning of whether the use of the nanovirus could be immoral or misused. Reducing your crisis between two civilisations to a straw man philosophical model between two parties then resolving it with a macguffin seems like it cheapens your narrative and the philosophy you were shoe horning in there.
I can see why this is well regarded, there is a lot that's good in here, and if you like a more classical style of science fiction this may tickle your fancy, but I don't feel it's quite as clever as it wants to seem. It's also hard to avoid the takeaway being that maybe eugenics would be good.
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.
I'd have given this book the fifth star if I'd actually cared about a single one of the humans in it, even the tiniest bit. I was rooting for the other team (no spoilers) the whole way through. Pretty impressed that the author made me care so much about the other team, though!
Not the ending I was expecting, but I'll be happy to read the sequel!
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?
Humanity sometimes sucks, but does it deserve to become extinct? Very creative world building and plot. Loved the writing. Was a bit freaked out by the spiders. But in the end I loved this book.
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 listened to this one. I'd walk my dog and put this on and be transported almost exactly like those Audible commercials. Some characterizations felt a bit stiff here and there but a thoroughly enjoyable book. It's the first time I've ever empathized with smart spiders.
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).
Although the plot looked interesting, the prose is dreadful. Florid sentences with as many clauses packed in as possible: "He listened and ran his encryptions and words began to leap out at him, in that formal, antique tongue of a vanished age of wonder and plenty, and an appalling capacity for destruction".
Presumably, "ran his encryptions" is an odd way of spelling decrypted.
To be honest "finished" doesn't mean I read it all, it meant I lost patience and couldn't read any more. Fortunately, it was a used book, so cheap.
