Adrian Tchaikovksy’s award-winning novel 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 … 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? Span
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Such an incredible book. I had no idea what I was in for. Loved every second.
I’ve fallen back into sci-fi as a genre here recently, and this one came recommended by my wife who, no surprise, was right about how good it was.
This is the first book by this author I’ve ever encountered, and it’ll definitely not be the last. The pacing is excellent, the world-building is second to none, and the characters spanning thousands of years worth of story are all incredibly well fleshed out. It never gets too lost in the details of how things are supposed to work, but paints in broad strokes a universe of life and danger, and the creeping adversary of time.
Honestly one of the best science fiction books I’ve ever read.
A generation ship carries the last hope of humankind from a doomed Earth. But there have already been secret plans for the continuation of Earthly life. Also, eco-terrorism, interstellar insanity, and the uplift of other Earth species, notably spiders.
The opening sections of this book are classic big-idea science fiction. I could easily imagine Larry Niven writing this in the 70s or David Brin in the 80s. More significantly, this could easily have been a strip in the science fiction comic 2000 A.D., where I learned a lot of my science fiction 70s and 80s.
We’ll come back to 2000AD in a moment.
The author writes with imagination and passion, and I recommend people give this book a try.
As a kid, I used to read 2000AD every week. If there was an underlying meta-theme behind the comic’s stories it would be this: for all the heroism, intelligence, sacrifice, and empathy demonstrated by individual people, as a group, humanity will always screw up in the end. It’s in our nature. We can’t help ourselves.
That’s a powerful concept when you’re eight, which is why it’s deeply embedded in me. It’s also one of the main themes of this book and the author isn’t subtle about it. Why should he? It remains a powerful concept.
Unfortunately, for me that left the author painting himself into a plot corner by about a third of the way through. For me, the structure of the rest of the book and the ending were clearly telegraphed and I eventually found myself skipping pages. The book was always going to finish with a showdown between the humans on the generation ship and the uplifted spiders. That’s so obvious it’s hardly a spoiler and it’s not a problem either. For me, the issue was that I was never in any doubt how that showdown would end.
Which is a shame, because there’s so much to like about everything else in this book. But that’s just me. And I know that’s the case because I’ve just taken a look at other people’s reviews and I don’t see other reviewers experiencing the same problem, which means you won’t too. Unless you grew up on 2000AD, that is, in which case you might be overly familiar with the theme.
For everyone else, I have no hesitation in heartily recommending this book.
First, let me say that this is some of the most outstanding, imaginative and thorough world-building I’ve ever read – to me, this was the best element of the book. To be honest, I preferred the spider characters to the human ones; I had trouble staying engaged with the human characters, and didn’t particularly care if they survived. Especially at the end, the book really struggled and lagged in terms of pacing. I skimmed the last 25 pages of drawn-out conflict to get to the resolution of the story, and that resolution, while satisfying in some respects, was also disturbing. I was left wondering if the survival of the human race was, after all, a good thing… Not only did they choose violence to attempt to achieve their goals, but they did it with the full awareness that they were repeating the mistakes of their ancestors, that annihilation of other species is something humans have always excelled at. Call me Pollyanna, but I truly want to think we’ll leave that kind of thinking behind sooner rather than later.