Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This book is a perennial favorite on the /r/printSF subreddit, so I've long been curious about it. The basic premise of the book is that in the far future, a human attempt to elevate life on an alien planet to sapience goes awry, causing a spider civilization to be uplifted. Generations later, some of the last humans in existence come to the same planet seeking a refuge, and finding much more than they bargained for.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Originally published: 2015
Read: November 2024

Children of Time mostly consists of two parallel narratives. One spans generation upon generation as the sapient spiders evolve and build their civilization; the other follows the last humans on their ark ship, especially one particular character, a "classicist" who gets woken up because he knows the languages and procedures of the humans of the era that seeded the spider planet.

I think there are a lot of neat ideas in this book but I felt like they were not told in the way that I find most compelling in my science fiction. Tchaikovsky has very clearly thought through the spider civilization, and that's probably the book's triumph. But—as I am always saying around here—the pleasure of sf is that it's a mystery, but the world itself is a mystery. By beginning at the beginning of the spider civilization and carrying you along with its development, the book circumvents that; you understand their society exactly because you see it grow step by step. I think I would have rather 1) just began the spider perspective sections at the end of their development, so that you as the reader had to work to understand this society from the perspective of one of its members, or even 2) not had any spider perspective sections at all, and get the human characters to have meaningful interaction with the spiders sooner, so that you as the reader come to understand this society along with the human characters. To me, the clash of cultures was the thing I was most interested it, but it's only at the very end of the book, and we don't get very much of it.

This isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. But I think what I enjoyed about the book—the "rationalized alienation" that Tchaikovsky put into the development of spider society, and actually also (and this I feel like doesn't go commented on enough in discourse around the book) the way the human society on the ark ship also changed over time—could have been maximized more with a different approach.