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reviewed Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Children of Time, #1)

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Time (Hardcover, 2015, Tor)

A race for survival among the stars... Humanity's last survivors escaped earth's ruins to find …

Review of 'Children of Time' on 'Storygraph'

I think it was mostly the writing style that bothered me. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly but it felt like a lot of the author stepping back from the story and saying “and this happened because reason but of course Character A doesn’t know this” instead of explaining things through the narrative/characters. 

It felt like some things just happened without any explanation or reason simply to advance the plot (or make up for the lack of plot).

I understand that sci-fi requires a certain suspension of disbelief but some things were just too silly. Like ant computers—come on!?


@gianni I can totally get not vibing with the style of writing. For folks more interested in a character drama, this isn't that style. There's a lot of exposition, and if you aren't interested in the history it's expositing, you're bound to lose interest. I've recommended this book to a few people that came back to me with the same critique.

But as a nerd, a software engineer working in biotech, and a background in physics to boot, I have to say that the ant computers were frankly a far more reasonable proposition than cryogenic sleep that works for thousands of years. The latter is a convenient trope of sci-fi so it doesn't get challenged much, but even if you could find a way, it is likely the energy requirements would be considerable, and the shelf life would probably still be hundreds of years at best, not thousands.