Children of Time

It’s a big ask to get the reader to identify with, let alone side with, a race of intelligent spiders, particularly when they’re fighting against the remnants of humanity.

Tchaikovsky manages this wonderfully in his Arthur C Clarke Award-winning novel because he absolutely loves spiders, and he communicates this love and fascination to the reader by acquainting them with three very special members of the spider civilisation who are completely surprising and fun to spend time with.

I loved this novel’s playfulness and humour balanced with high-stakes action and thrills. And I learned a lot about spiders along the way.

I love a good science fiction story, and in this book, Adrian Tchaikovsky is in top form. Here is a crisp, intelligent, engaging, and well-written space opera—one of the finest in a generation.

In it, Tchaikovsky shows off his visionary grip on future human possibilities, his biological understanding of evolution, and how it might be artificially accelerated—in spiders, for God’s sake!

If you’re searching for aliens, you have to think about the time and distances involved in space travel—and what might happen to us as we head out into the great unknown. Tchaikovsky’s fantastic science fiction novel cleverly plays with the concepts of evolution, intelligence, faith, and survival.

This book is full of smart, mind-blowing ideas and made me realize that, despite our egocentric view of humanity’s place in the cosmos, ours may not be the only species with intergalactic potential. I couldn’t put it down. 

We know there are families in the animal world, and we know there are bigger social constructs, too.

I’ve read about how animals have emotion and show compassion for one another, and even for other species. It makes me wonder about the why and how of the human dynamic and a book like this one that takes that and creates a looking glass for me to consider that is a good brain story for me.

There is a slow build of emotion in this book. The use of cryogenic sleep allows the human characters to live for thousands of years. The passing of genetic memory from generation to generation allows the spider characters to do the same. But the spiders have one advantage. They’ve been infected by a human-designed nanovirus which causes them to evolve on an accelerated basis. And finally, AI allows the villain of the story, Avrana Kern, to live on, in spite of her human body wearing out. We ultimately feel the deep emotion of living things, struggling against one another to… show more.

This book made me question my own arachnophobia, and that’s saying something. Sentient spiders evolving physiologically and socially both terrified and reassured me. This is a case of anthropomorphisation (did I spell that right?) done bang on. Tchaikovsky takes us on a Sapiens-esque journey of evolution for a species that we all know, albeit with a foreign intellect, and makes us actually root for them…spiders!