Children of Time: Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel

By Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is an epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a hostile, terraformed planet.

'Entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human' - Patrick Ness, author of A Monster Calls

The last remnants of the human race have 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, its new occupiers 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 will emerge as the rightful heirs of this new Earth?

Dive into Tchaikovsky's chillingly brilliant universe with Children of Time, the Winner of the 30th anniversary Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel.

Continue the journey with Children of Ruin and Children of Memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Jun 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781447273318

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, has practised law and now writes full time. He's also studied stage-fighting, perpetrated amateur dramatics and has a keen interest in entomology and table-top games. Adrian is the author of the critically acclaimed Shadows of the Apt series, the Echoes of the Fall series and other novels, novellas and short stories. Children of Time won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Children of Ruin and Shards of Earth both won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel. The Tiger and the Wolf won the British Fantasy Award for Best Fantasy Novel, while And Put Away Childish Things won the BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction.

Reviews for Children of Time

[Sourav Datta · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In brief, I loved it!

Never did I ever think that I would be so interested in the evolution and struggle of a species other than humans, particularly one that I am not very fond of :-)

I feel this is a story that belongs to its own category. The masterful world-building, science, sci-fi, and characters (non-human ones especially) need more than one reading to appreciate fully. While I am onto the next part of the epic, I will be thinking about it for a long time.

[infjsarah · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not sure why I waited so long to listen to this book. Because it was really good. There's a reason there was so much hype when it came out. I loved the contrast of the 2 cultures & the uniqueness of the spider culture. And how what I expected to be the usual destructive human ending was suborned. An excellent read.

[karlstar_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A engrossing story of uplift (to use the Brin term) or guided evolution. Far in the future, a single Earth scientist is terraforming a world far off in the galaxy, with the plan to rapidly uplift some monkeys on the planet when it is ready. Enter some Luddite terrorists and things go really, really differently. What follows is the evolution of a species from basically Neanderthal to modern levels, while competing with humans looking for a new planet to settle. This really grabbed me at the start, then dragged a bit in the middle while we got dragged through the equivalent of the Stone Age to the Rennaissance and sometimes got a bit repetitive, but it was interesting. This is more science fantasy, there's no hard science here. Good stuff.

[ajagbay · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

 Children of Time, the first entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, is an epic exploration in alternating parts: what does the future of humanity look like in a society driven by division and how might a species and society evolve given fundamentally different perspective of the universe.The former follows the remnants of humanity following a society-ending civil war. Humanity has gone from being a successful space-faring civilization in the process of expanding to new worlds to a single ship trying to using the remains of the past to find a new start for humanity. It is a story of survival and of human relationships.The later is a wonderful speculative experiment in how a species, spiders in this case, could evolve to reach the same place as humanity. However, they do not evolve in complete isolation: this is actually a human experiment gone wrong. Humanity has developed a virus meant to usher primates in an accelerated evolutionary path towards building a civilization, but complications during the initial launch resulted in the loss of the apes and the eventual evolution of arthropods.It is a fascinating exploration into a completely different perspective that manages to balance fleshing out the details of how this society develops without being too overwhelming. This narrative is a refreshing take on alternate history.

[reading_fox · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

SPIDERS! A great counter evolutionary science fiction, looking at other ways life could develop. Like all science fiction it doesn't have to be very likely, just possible. Post holocaust mankind spreads to the galaxy leaving Earth burning behind them. A colony ship finds that man has been here before, carrying a 'rogue' scientist who planned a planetary experiment on a formerly barren world. They planned to use a virus so speed up evolution so that they could observe life progress using crypreservation to sleep away the generations of change. Their intended starting pint - the common lab monkey, is perhaps the biggest error in the whole book, as monkeys are of course already as equally evolved as humans are. But the probe crashed and life took a different turn.Very well done - and a reminder that just because we've always used technology this way it doesn't have to be so. Likewise the Prisonner's Dilemma is only the case if you're independant.

[malcrf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Simply excellent, in all ways. Characterisation, prose, premise, you can't ask for more.

[aadyer · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A good start to what I assume will be a series of books. An intriguing and interesting development of an alien species, and how they evolve to where they do. In some ways a cautionary tale, with a degree of ambivalent morality about it. Unlike a lot of science fiction, makes you think. I would read the next in the series.

[tuusannuuska-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Every time I read Children of Time, I love it a tiny bit more than the last time. This is the perfect book.

“He could be human, in that last moment. He could exalt in his ability to destroy.”
This is a book that shines a light on everything that has gone wrong with humanity and continues to do so without end in sight. We start the journey in a future where humanity has conquered the stars, and end up thousands of years further still. There is a planet humans have terraformed for their new Eden, but through our inability to fight for a common cause, instead of fighting each other, that world is now home to something wholly unexpected and horrifying. A fight for survival ensues, because to fight is all humans are capable of.

“In the end, he supposed, it didn't matter. Genocide was genocide. He thought of the Old Empire, which had been so civilized that it had in the end poisoned its own homeworld. And here we are, about to start ripping pieces of the ecosystem out of this new one.”
This is a book that covers huge topics, all pertaining to humanity’s past and current social issues. The setting provides a distance that gives the reader the opportunity to view things a little more objectively, although the message is by no means subtle. It covers ruthless gender inequality, otherness and othering, history, religion, the pitfalls of blind obedience, as well as individual efforts, for better or for worse, in trying to make a mark. It covers courage, sacrifice, individuality, and how fragile we all are in the face of trying to survive. How can we change when surviving means safety, and safety means leaning on what we already know, no matter how destructive the results have been in the past?

“If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?”
This is a book about humanity, about humanity’s endless tendency towards destruction, about delusions of grandeur, about our tendency to glorify the past without the ability to learn from past mistakes, about our inability to see each other as kin, rather than as other, about greed, and fear, and self-destruction. Maybe a little about hope, in the end, if we are forced to change our ways.

This book hits a little different, what with the constant looming threats of environmental disasters, diseases, the current trend of stepping back in time when it comes to human rights , and wars led by people who have truly decided to cherry pick the lessons of our global histories.

I recommend this book to everyone.

[tikimoof · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Super ambitious, I loved the scope of it! A ton of research has to have gone into this; it was super cool!

I just was unenthused by the end and could have happily continued with only spider uplift stories. Less Holsten too, just far too passive.

[jerevo · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

In the sections covering the cultural development of the spider-like species the humans of the book semi-deliberately, semi-accidentally create there are hints of an interesting ideas novel in the mode of Arthur C. Clarke, and it may be that as this strand of the story moves centre stage the book begins to earn its high ratings, but I couldn't face wading through the bizarre pseudoscience, hackneyed dialogue and cardboard characters long enough to find out. DNF.

[gridcube-504137 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

o.o

this book was a.m.a.z.i.n.g.

[sgsmitty · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one. It was highly rated which for me sometimes doesn’t mean anything. But this was a very good book. It is a story of survival, of experimental ships sent out to start new planets and of colonization ships sent out to spread mankind. The story had some surprises with the experimental ship and its’ cargo and the impact it has on a planet previously terraformed for terrestrial life. I cannot say much more but the life that developed was extremely fascinating and unique in how they formed and developed. The ending was wonderful and makes me hopeful that there might be a sequel someday.

[iira_24 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Such an incredible and imaginative story! Tchaikovsky is truly a talented world-builder and storyteller. At times fascinating and at times creepy, a great read through and through.

[ailurophile-709426 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I confess to mixed feelings about Children of Time.

On the plus side:
(1) This book is full of spiders! Meter-long, sapient spiders! Spiders have been a hobby of mine since I was a small boy, gotta love it for that alone.
(2) The spider-characters are nicely developed. Their attitudes and behaviors are convincingly alien.
(3) Similarly, the spidery civilization is inventively conceived, and really does seem like a kind of social arrangement that might evolve among intelligent arachnids.

On the minus side, though:
(1) The humans are less well rendered. Some, I felt, were stereotypical. I really enjoyed the spider chapters; the human chapters, in contrast, were often a bit of a slog.
(2) The notion of populating a planet with monkeys, and then relying on a sort of "fire and forget" nano-virus to uplift them to sentience in situ may have been a convenient plot device, but seems far-fetched. In particular, the idea that such a virus, intended from the outset to work on primates, would also work on arthropods really stretched my credibility.

(Minor spoiler follows...)

















(3) The ending struck me as rather too warm and fuzzy. "Just a little shot of magical spider-juice and you'll see that Spiders are your Friend, human!"

[drardavis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This story takes place over a huge span of time, yet Tchaikovsky deals with this problem brilliantly. The two human main characters manage to survive through repeated stretches of technological hibernation popping in and out of history until the bitter end. The spider monsters/heroines take their place over the millennia revealing the development of their society. The science is extremely well researched, making this in one sense, hard sci-fi. However, the emphasis is on the development of individuals and civilizations, so there is a strong philosophical backbone to the tale. There are numerous cool concepts I have never read before, but I can’t mention them specifically without giving away too much. I never saw the conclusion coming. It was great!

[needmoreshelves · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I just need everyone to know that this book has giant sentient spiders because....I did not NOT know going in, and it just about freaked me all the way out.Anyway. This was a really good sci-fi novel. I'm a sucker for a good first contact story, and this was a great one. There were a few spots that I felt the like human storyline dragged a little - the spider storyline was always exactly perfecly paced.

[jamestomasino · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I wish I'd known that spiders feature prominently in this story. I would have avoided it on that alone and saved myself so much squeamishness.

Other than the spider thing the story is quite good and not obvious or predictable.

[sunyidean · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found this surprisingly good. Surprising because I tend towards the soft and literary end of SFF, and also because I bloody hate spiders. So much hate.

I looked up the author and was not at all surprised to see his roleplay interests. This would be a fantastic roleplay setting (and hey, the spider story is good too). He does a good job connecting you to characters who change (as in live, die, and are replaced by new ones) through the centuries.

I found some of the human portions slow but the whole thing pulls together nicely at the end, with subtle moments of profundity and quirky, interesting observations and insights.

[judygibson-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Filled with new ideas, rare in science fiction. Wow. What happens when humans, fleeing a destroyed Earth, head to a terraformed planet where the uplift process has gone awry and the newly-evolved Earth species is not the planned primates, but rather spiders (and other invertebrates)?

[wishanem · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is the sort of book that was periodically a chore to read, but really fun to think about when I wasn't reading it.

I loved the premise of this story, and enjoyed the overall plot, but I really struggled with a lot of the individual chapters. The way that the story jumps around in time, and especially the author's decision to recycle the same names over and over, made it difficult for me to invest in the shorter narrative arcs.

The moments of the story usually focused on uncertainty, pessimism, struggle, and trauma, but the overarching direction was one of progress and hope.

At the end, I was happy that I stuck it out.

I don't know if I'll read the next book in this series anytime soon, but I do think I'll get to it eventually.

[debbie13410 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked much of it but couldn't get into sentient spiders.

[andorion-259107 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A beautiful, epic science fiction ride.

I loved the author's take on an alternative evolution. I loved the successive societies. I loved how beautifully he integrates an alternate sensory system! Stuff like this is so rare - its not just one exceptional individual but an entire society that functions in a different way from humans.

The long voyages and the epic timescale had me thinking of Alastair Reynolds.

I also loved the ending. I was hoping for an ending that stepped outside conflict and that was beautifully done.

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Garbage pretending to be hard sci fi.

[stephkaye-923485 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After terraforming a planet, humans plan to populate it with monkeys and an accelerated-evolution virus. However, only the virus arrives, so it goes to work accelerating the evolution of – spiders!
A thoughtful examination of the evolution of “human” traits, and what a civilization developed by another species might look like.

[fothpaul · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a thick book. The story itself was a good one, one that stays with you for a time after reading it. The chopping back and forth style made it difficult for me at times, as I was dipping in and out of the book, meaning I was losing track of some of the plot as I went. I did enjoy this story though, and would be interested to see where the next in the series takes it.

[jrlibrary · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

DNFI know that lots of people loved this book and I usually love sci GIC books but the intelligent spider scientists just didn’t work at all for me; had to give it up after 190 pages - just couldn’t handle anymore.

[3j0hn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's true what they say, the spiders are more interesting than the people, probably because they are written in the present tense while the people are written in past tense.

[tronella_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mostly excellent. I could have done without the "what if feminism but spiders" stuff, which I found too heavy-handed.

[jayeless-698797 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It surprised me that I ended up enjoying this book; even at the halfway mark (300 pages in!) I was grumbling that it was so dry and unengaging that I thought it'd barely scrape two stars. However, the more advanced the spider civilisation became, the more interested I became in the story, and by the last third or so I found it a real page-turner.

It's also one of those cerebral books that tries to provoke thoughts more than it does entertain. Children of Time is set deep into the far future, and is mostly about humanity's tendency towards self-destruction. At the very beginning, Doctor Avrana Kern is attempting to begin an experiment on a terraformed world, whereby monkeys will be infected with a nanovirus to hasten their evolution, in the hope that this results in a version of humanity without the same flaws. The experiment is sabotaged by a member of her own team, so the monkeys never land, and instead the planet is populated by ants, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies – with the nanovirus taking root in the spiders. Avrana Kern herself manages to make a getaway while everyone else on her team is killed, and places herself in suspended animation, anticipating rescue.

Rescue never comes. The conflict that destroys her team ends up also destroying Earth, and nearly all of it – just excluding a thin band around the equator – is covered in ice. Humanity's numbers dwindle precipitously, and as day-to-day survival takes up so much of their time, they lose the cultural and technological knowledge that Kern's generation had. Once the species stabilises enough that they can build their technological base back up again, they cause global warming and discover that the permafrost had been covering oodles of nasty poisons. To escape that, they have to put as much of humanity as they can into suspended animation, and send them out into the stars in pursuit of a new, habitable planet, on a vast ship called the Gilgamesh.

The half of the book that focuses on the humans details the struggle of the Gilgamesh's crew to find a planet they can land on. They find Kern's planet, but the AI of the computer keeping Kern's suspended body alive denies them permission to land. And so they remain in space, generation after generation, with the egotists on the crew plunging them into a series of petty, destructive conflicts and with the machinery of the ship slowly but steadily deteriorating beyond the ability of the crew to repair. The main perspective here is that of Holsten, a classicist who periodically comes out of suspended animation to despair at how humanity is falling back into the self-destructive habits of the Ancients before going back into deep sleep again.

Meanwhile, on Kern's planet, a sophisticated arachnid society is emerging, and flourishing. Like I said, I found the first half of their plotline, where they're mainly fighting wars against ants, really boring, but they got exponentially more interesting once they had an actual civilisation going. The spider society is no utopia – one of the major threads running through the book is male spiders' struggle to be given respect and authority on par with females (or at least enough that the females will stop killing them after mating for sport) – but the depiction is sympathetic. Honestly, it's remarkable how well Tchaikovsky has depicted this society which is profoundly non-human, but still made them understandable, and even relatable, for an obviously human readership.

There are definitely some aspects to this book that some readers will find unsatisfying. The ending is a bit of a conceit, if a conceit set up from early on in the book – despite what the cover might suggest, this is not “hard sci fi” in a scientific sense. Most of the human characters are extremely unlikeable. The universe it presents is, mostly, bleak. And overall, its merits are way more that it stimulates the mind rather than grips you by the feels… so if you prefer books that you have more of an emotional investment in, this is not ideal. It is, nonetheless, a very accomplished book that I'm glad to have read, even if it was rough going a lot of the time.

[mhartford_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a fascinating exploration of a truly alien intelligence, as well as a thoughtful exploration of religion, love, and the tension between individual and species-level survival. I look forward to starting "Children of Ruin."