Children of Time

I am a decade late to the party, but I can’t say nothing about my most recent read, Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Published in 2015, read by me in 2025, the comment on the cover says it all:

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The smartest evolutionary world-building you will ever read.

So much of science fiction in my reading experience takes place in the realm of physics: spaceships, laser beams, new weapons, new ways to travel the universe, teleporters, and interdimensional rifts. I love all of that, but this book delivered something I didn’t know I needed: a reminder that the biological sciences have as much to offer us in the realm of science fiction and imagination as any spaceship.

Don’t get me wrong, this book has both. There is a generational spaceship too. I won’t be giving much of anything away, as you learn this in the first few pages, but humanity has fallen. After rising to heights our current civilization can only dream about, a galaxy-spanning empire comes to a halt. It still relied on Earth, and Earth fell to warfare and the inability to see eye to eye. The remnants of that civilization crawl their way back to space travel over thousands of years and encounter the genetic legacy of our tampering with other planets.

That alone would make this book worth the read, but our author makes some decisions which are rare, outstanding, and work. Told from two points of view, one third person limited and close, a human who wakes and sleeps through the millennia of our tale; and the other an omniscient third person point of view, rarely in use these days, it is the only reasonable way into the head of a sentient race of spiders.

Because that is what Portia and her kind are. Uplifted and modified by us, we watch their history and learn about them and their stark, radical differences from us through their development, with the inevitable question of what happens when these two species meet?

This book took evolutionary biology and the technological evolution of a completely different species places I couldn’t have imagined. It threaded the needle of just enough information about both stories to keep me hooked, wanting to know more about the final destiny of the human race while I was reading about them, but still missing Portia and her eight-legged friends. Then, while reading about Portia’s people, it kept me wondering how their evolution would go, and oddly rooting for them in the inevitable confrontation with our species. (I’ll tell you for free that it doesn’t go down the way you think, and the ending is a brave, fascinating conclusion.)

There are other books, on order and on the way to read, but even if you don’t finish the series, this book was truly worthy of its Hugo Award.

5/5