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.
No spoilers but - I did not see that coming. What a great ride, I'm looking forward to the sequel.
There´s something about good space stories that captivate your attention. That build step by step, and suddenly it becomes really hard to explain to someone else the plot without seeming crazy.
repetitive & boring
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (finished 12NOV2019)
Good, but ending felt 'deus ex machina', through there have been hints about it beforehand, and it's a logical conclusion. I like the exploration of complications caused by cryogenic sleep, where while suspended the aging and dreaming stops, and then when the person wakes up later on, not knowing how many decades, maybe centuries even have passed, he encounters someone who continued living and that other person is older now, and it's such a strange situation. I like how the novel shows how much psychological toll this would have on the person. /// How the novel uses time is also interesting. The scope is vast - thousands of years, and I like the idea of humanity losing knowledge of certain high-technologies which they later on would find and expend a lot of effort on decoding and actually using. /// The classicist is …
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (finished 12NOV2019)
Good, but ending felt 'deus ex machina', through there have been hints about it beforehand, and it's a logical conclusion. I like the exploration of complications caused by cryogenic sleep, where while suspended the aging and dreaming stops, and then when the person wakes up later on, not knowing how many decades, maybe centuries even have passed, he encounters someone who continued living and that other person is older now, and it's such a strange situation. I like how the novel shows how much psychological toll this would have on the person. /// How the novel uses time is also interesting. The scope is vast - thousands of years, and I like the idea of humanity losing knowledge of certain high-technologies which they later on would find and expend a lot of effort on decoding and actually using. /// The classicist is a mostly sympathetic character. I also like the more 'extreme' personalities like Dr. Avrana Kern, and the ship captain of the space ark Gilgamesh. /// The exploration of alternate technologies is interesting. The novel shows what would happen if a culture/society only has these limited things to work on because of physical-biological reasons. I like how it was described as 'space age - stone age' by one of the characters. Overall, an engaging story with great world-building and extrapolations. Has sympathetic characters, and interesting alternate technological possibilities.
One of the best science fiction books I've read. So many great characters, so many fascinating ideas. I cared about the outcome of the story so much that, for the very first time in my life, I was tempted to skip forward to the end to see what happens, and whether it all works out.
This would had been four stars if the build-up wasn't as long.
This would had been four stars if the build-up wasn't as long.
This was an outstanding novel. The author successfully and very interestingly explored the concepts of sentience, humanity, and family. Although thematically dystopian, the story line was exhilarating and intriguing. One of my best reads of the year.
This book bounces from the PoV of the spider civilization and the human remnant and it's a rare book that can convince an arachnophobe to cheer for the giant spiders over humanity.
OK, wow. Occasionally a book comes along that makes me want to go back and downgrade all my previous 5-star reviews to 4-stars just so this one can be clearly ahead of all the rest. This is definitely that book. I picked it up fairly randomly on Audible and holy crap, this is an amazing masterwork. Apparently winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and can we give it all the other awards too? If you enjoyed David Brin's Uplift Trilogy, if you enjoyed Diane Duane's spider scientist K't'lk, if you enjoyed Raising the Stones by Sherri Tepper .... then you will love this book, and love finding elements of all of these in it.
It starts with a clear nod to the Uplift Trilogy as the terraforming ship "Brin II" begins preparing a potential colony world for a long process of terraforming, ultimately with the hope of creating …
OK, wow. Occasionally a book comes along that makes me want to go back and downgrade all my previous 5-star reviews to 4-stars just so this one can be clearly ahead of all the rest. This is definitely that book. I picked it up fairly randomly on Audible and holy crap, this is an amazing masterwork. Apparently winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and can we give it all the other awards too? If you enjoyed David Brin's Uplift Trilogy, if you enjoyed Diane Duane's spider scientist K't'lk, if you enjoyed Raising the Stones by Sherri Tepper .... then you will love this book, and love finding elements of all of these in it.
It starts with a clear nod to the Uplift Trilogy as the terraforming ship "Brin II" begins preparing a potential colony world for a long process of terraforming, ultimately with the hope of creating a new earthlike planet and "uplifting" monkeys using a custom nanovirus. Long story short - things don't go according to plan, either for the human race or the monkeys, nor for a charming and unusually intelligent species of jumping spider that turns out to be somewhat susceptible to the virus also.
The scope is literally epic, spanning millenia, and touching on humanity's self-destructive instincts, the end of the human race as we know it, space exploration, uplift, insane artificial intelligence, extremely sympathetic spider characters, and programming via ants (couldn't help wondering if this was a nod to Terry Pratchett also...) It is a LONG book, 16.5 hours in audio form and massive in scope, but beautifully written and I can't imagine any science fiction fan who enjoys authors like Brin and Vinge would not also enjoy this. But enough review writing, I must now go and read everything else by this author.
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.
This is a book about humanity, and spiderity (is that a word?) from it's peak down to it's rock bottom and then back again.
I don't want to talk too much about it because the story has so much in it, and to describe parts of it would overlook others. Needless to say I was very affected by the story, I cried a lot and felt real links to the plight of people, and to arthropods (that frankly I have somewhat an irrational disgust of).
I can't recommend this enough.
Astonishingly good sf that reverses many conventional tropes into stellar, scintillating form.
