Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - A Review
“Hateful day when I received life!” I exclaimed in agony. “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.”
If you enjoy reading sci-fi, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky lies somewhere between space opera and hard science fiction—leaning more toward the latter with a premise that Mr. Tchaikovsky must have been excited about for years. Honestly, it’s the premise that got me wanting to reading the story in the first place:
After a literal world-building procedure goes wrong on a distant Earth-like planet, the last of the human race return to find a society of evolved spiders inhabiting the world they hoped to inherit as their new home.
Portia labiata jumping spider
So we have evolutionary worldbuilding, highly evolved spiders, and the vestiges of humanity trying to find a new home? The story basically writes itself at that point. But what did I think of it?
Children of Time (CoT) is a good book. Strike that, it’s a great book. But I can’t say that I loved it.
In CoT, it’s more about the ideas than it is about the characters. That’s not a criticism. While I tend to gravitate toward character-based stories, Mr. Tchaikovsky does some decent character work throughout the book, which is difficult to pull off because the timeline of the story takes place over thousands of years.
This book is inspiring to me because of how vast the universe is. It’s the ideas in this book that captivate me. The spiders and worldbuilding are cool. The human characters, not so much. And that’s the problem.
**Beware! Spoilers ahead!**
Also, this book may cure arachnophobia. (Your experience may vary.)
Tchaikovsky has struck gold with CoT.
The premise, to me, is so interesting that it harkens back to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Both books deal with the consequences of using technology to create new life—or, at least, a new form of life. It always goes wrong, no matter what. Unlike Frankenstein, however, Tchaikovsky brings salvation to both humans and spiders through the same technology but in a roundabout way.
By creating the spiders with the nanovirus, the humans inadvertently save themselves in the end, in a way they didn’t expect. It’s a brilliant concept. It’s brilliant worldbuilding.
I only have a few quibbles.
What Didn’t Resonate With Me
I’ll be forthright: the main reason why I didn’t absolutely “love” this book has nothing to do with the writing or the premise—which are both very good. It has everything to do with my tastes as a reader. The human chapters are told from a closer, third-person POV and the spider chapters are told from omniscient, which, in general, I’m not a fan of.
But, to be fair, there is no other way to write this book, in my opinion. How do you tell the spiders’ story without seeming so completely alien that it comes off as unrelatable? You can’t. No, you need a human narrator telling the 1,000+ year story of a few key spiders who influenced history.
How does Tchaikovsky get around this in the human chapters? Well, there’s cryostasis—and the main human we follow for thousands of years keep going under and are brought out of stasis at key points in their timeline.
All well and good, but by the end of the story, I kept waiting for our main POV character, Holsten, to become more important, more powerful. For most of the novel, he’s either ignored or sidelined by stronger characters—only used for his expertise in languages and history. I kept waiting for Holsten to have his day. That day never came.
I wondered if the reason why Tchaikovsky had chosen Holsten as the main POV human character was because he would play a pivotal role at the end that determined the outcome. But that’s not what happened.
Apart from figuring out ways around some communication barriers, Holsten is a bit of an underwhelming character. So, I was underwhelmed.
However, I acknowledge that this is exactly what I mentioned earlier. The story is not about the characters, it’s about the ideas. Holsten isn’t a hero. Nothing he does changes the outcome of the story. I have a few other small quibbles which aren’t worth mentioning in terms of character choices and actions. Plot very much controls the narrative.
What’s the Big Idea?
CoT is very much a sociological story. That is, it’s a story about societies. In this case, two societies: the humans and the spiders.
So what story can you tell with these two polar-opposite societies on a collision course? I’m not sure, but the story that Tchaikovsky elected to tell is one of empathy. Because if you can empathize with a spider, then you can empathize with almost anyone and anything.
And that’s exactly what he does with the reader.
Once we move beyond our initial reaction to the spiders (Ewww), then we can learn to see them as creations with purpose in a wider universe. That’s fantastic. Instead of space marines going on a bug hunt, Tchaikovsky gives us a more nuanced collision at the end. Is there initial violence? Yes, true to humanity’s form, and because Holsten didn’t figure out what the spiders were saying in time.
AND because the spiders had the absolute SCARIEST way of injecting humans with the empathy serum. No wonder humans fought back.
Art by Tom Sterckx (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qz8qmB)
Despite all the lives lost, the end of the story is about the future of two species working together. One species essentially fills in the blind spots of the other.
When I finished reading, I couldn’t help but think of the parallels with Frankenstein. It’s been 200+ years since Mary Shelley published that book, and we’re still finding new ways to tell that story, and with different endings.
And this is where I judge books: how everything coheres at the end. If a book is able to stick the landing, great. If it’s able to do so in a surprising, entertaining way, even better.
The end of CoT was fairly…anticipated.
By the time I’d gotten into the third act, I had already predicted the story ending. Of course, there were some details I didn’t foresee (like Holsten’s character being fairly useless at the end), but overall, the story ended predictably. Humans and spiders eventually come together peacefully and face the future together on the green planet.
But this leads me to my next assertion…
Humans Aren’t Useless in the Future
Nowadays, whenever there’s an alien race that “threatens” the human race, it’s always so much better than the humans are. There’s a prevalent sentiment that “humanity sucks” and “I can’t wait for the next plague.” In CoT, the sentiment is that humanity is both destructive and ineffectual at the same time for the following reasons:
Holsten, who begins to realize that the spiders are sentient at the end of the story because of how they use their language, is incapable of doing anything to stop Karst’s bug hunt. He doesn’t even really try, making him a pretty ineffectual protagonist.
The spiders end up “saving” humanity by forcibly injecting them with an empathy serum based upon the nanovirus. (Talk about literally giving them a taste of their own medicine…)
Up until the end, humans have been making a lot of terrible decisions, like leaving a bunch of their own behind on a practically uninhabitable planet to die, causing an insurrection aboard the Gilgamesh that negatively impacts ship-born humans for generations.
Tchaikovsky wants us to empathize with the humans as well as the spiders. However, because of his admittedly obvious bias, I believe the spiders are meant to hold a more special place in the reader’s heart. And that, again, isn’t a criticism. It’s a fact inherent in the premise of the story. You couldn’t tell this story without building empathy for the spiders over time.
But the humans are sort of rendered impotent. That’s where I have a problem.
If I had told this story (oh—the absolute hubris!), I probably wouldn’t have neutered the humans as much as they were in terms of how much influence they had over the ending of the story. They never stood a chance! But the spiders’ overwhelming power and likability negated everything the humans did to counteract them.
You might even cheer the spiders on as they swept through the Gilgamesh at the end of the book, thinking they were killing all the humans—only to be disappointed a chapter or two later when you found out the humans were alive and now couldn’t help but be empathetic toward the spiders.
But let’s hypothetically raise the stakes a bit more:
What if we knew about the empathy serum ahead of time?
And what if the humans had more firepower and numbers that could pose a legitimate threat against the spiders?
What if there are two factions of humans—one that wants peace and another that wants war?
What if Holsten and the peaceful faction actually did something interesting to try and stop the fighting at the end?
Then, when we root for the spiders we’re really rooting for both sides to win. We’re also more invested in Holsten’s overall arc because he becomes more active in preventing mass death. He becomes more likable, like the spiders. You can make douchebag humans, sure, but now we’re more invested in achieving peaceful balance rather than cheering the spiders on to get rid of the human pests.
Mr. Tchaikovsky (or you) might not like my version of the story. That’s fine. My point is, my version of humanity wouldn’t be as useless. We could argue about how realistic the humans were portrayed in CoT, but humanity should control its own fate. It’s a difference in worldviews at this point. That, and it’s the difference between plot-driven and character-driven sci-fi.
Conclusion
In the end, however, CoT is not a pessimistic story. In fact, it’s quite optimistic—and far more optimistic than Frankenstein—in its envisioning of a future where even polar-opposites (creation and creator; spider and human) can find common ground through technology. How sci-fi is that?
While the genre and ending didn’t work 100% for me, I have the utmost respect for what Tchaikovsky has done in CoT, and I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who loves big-idea, plot-driven sci-fi.
