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.
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 are the true heirs of this new Earth?
Some of you may be surprised, after reading the publicity above, at the name of the author. With Children of Time, the author of Epic Fantasy series Shadow of the Apt now turns his hand to a big, fat, stridently SF novel.
Avrana Kern is a scientist leader in a spaceship above a planet being terraformed for humans and uplifted animals. When her spaceship is destroyed by a fanatic’s sabotage, she is forced to abandon her crew and hastily seed the planet with a nanovirus that integrates intelligence with the already existing animals there. Avrana then puts herself into cryogenic suspension in a sentry pod above the planet in the hope that eventually rescue will occur.
Two hundred years later, The Gilgamesh and its five hundred cryogenically frozen humans arrive from a destroyed Earth, expecting to settle and colonise an Earth-like planet. On hearing Avrana’s automatic distress signal they investigate, to find that they are not exactly welcomed by Avrana Kern and her AI (or ‘competent expert system’) Eliza Kern. Whilst Avrana has been in cold sleep, her AI Eliza has evolved to take on many of Avrana’s traits. Both the human and the AI have not dealt with the long wait well and, as the arrival of people ‘threatens’ the experiment on the planet below, their response to the planet’s potential invaders is initially rather threatening.
Meanwhile, the nanovirus, originally planned for rapid monkey evolution, has, over time and generations, uplifted species already evolving on the planet below, particularly spiders and ants.
This is a novel where the progression of time looms over everything. Cryogenic sleep allows our characters to live long, long lives and allows evolutionary changes to occur on the planet whilst the others are sleeping. Not all the consequences of this are welcome and some will come to a logical, if unpleasant, fruition through the novel.
Much of the enjoyment of this book lies in following two storylines. In one we see the evolution and uplifting of arachnids and their initial steps into space. In the other storyline we have the opposite – spacefaring humans whose travels over time degenerate.
The spiders evolve through a succession of generations, each with their own identifiable characters. Adrian here names them Bianca, Viola, Portia and Fabian, although it is in reality not just the original creatures we see but their many, many descendants that we follow through the novel. I found it interesting that the arachnid world is a female-dominated one, which creates a different societal view.
From this we have many identifiable archetypes. Portia is the hunter-leader, the dynamic action heroine determined to ensure her species’ survival. Viola is one of Portia’s supporters, a maverick scientist who unravels scientific mysteries, encourages innovation and develops a communications network of coordinated actions through other insects – beetles, ants, shrimp and the like. In contrast, Bianca is the astronomer-philosopher, who believes that the masses of mathematical data beamed down from Kern is a message from the god-like Messenger. Fabian is the male whose keen mind brings a different perspective to things and manages to negotiate equality for males against all female instincts. He becomes an enabler, a figure who proves that males have a value beyond reproduction.
On the Gilgamesh our human story is mainly told through classicist (think historian and studier of culture) Holsten Mason and ship’s chief engineer Isa Lain. The journey is not easy – the ship has revolutions, an increasingly insane captain, cults, coups and attempts to upload humans into the computer life-support, all with varying degrees of success. Whilst most of the ‘cargo’are asleep, we see the active human society splinter into successions of increasingly ill-equipped, socially inept and generally rather unpleasant people. In contrast to the arachnids, the crew of the Gilgamesh fight, bicker and squabble in a society in decline.
The arrival of the arkship Gilgamesh near to the planet is not a meeting that begins well. Avrana Kern is, from the beginning, a cool, emotionally detached sociopath, and her only response to the potential colonists is to warn them away from her ‘experiment’. An initial landing on Kern’s World ends in rather gruesome failure, with the result that the Gilgamesh is forced to continue its journey to another planet to settle.
The journey though is a circuitous one as the ‘habitable’ planet proves less so. And so the crew of the Gilgamesh, getting increasingly older and despite sessions in cryogenic cold sleep, find that they must return to Kern’s World if they are to survive.
Plotwise, this means that by sending the Gilgamesh on a long journey the spiders may continue to evolve whilst the humans continue to degrade. The last quarter of the book is about what happens when the two meet at Kern’s World.
The book builds slowly at first, leading to this conclusion. However, the last quarter of the book is genuinely exciting and has some of the best moments of action and tension I’ve read in a long while. The return of the Gilgamesh sees the spiders determined to protect their species, which they do with space-age initiative and stone-age-like guile.
In summary, Children of Time is a book that is old-school SF in tone and epic in time- scale, with some genuinely likeable aliens that will remain memorable after you have finished the book. Like a Stephen Baxter novel with an epic sweep of history (see his Evolution, for example), added to a broad cast of a Peter Hamilton Space Opera and the narrative drive of, say, a David Brin or a Greg Bear old style SF novel, Children of Time soon got me hooked. Not one for arachnophobes, however, even though in the end I personally sided with the spiders.
A pleasingly, entertainingly solid read.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Published by TOR UK, June 2015
ISBN: 978-1447273288
600 pages
Review by Mark Yon, May 2015
Looks like a real change for Adrian!
Well, you could argue that having spiders and ants in one of Adrian’s stories is not *that* different… but yes, IMO the tone and the way the information is used is different to the Fantasy stuff. I have read and reviewed some of his shorter SF stories before (see the Feast and Famine link below) and liked them a lot, too, if that helps.
Thanks for the comment, S!
I have heard so many good things about this series and have this and Children of Ruin in my tbr pile. I can’t wait to read them.
I read Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War a couple of years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.