The verdict
A hugely enjoyable and genuinely original novel that gets better as it goes. The spiders are why people remember it, but it works because Tchaikovsky is serious about the question underneath: what makes a civilisation worthy of the world it lives on.
Quick facts
- Author
- Adrian Tchaikovsky
- First published
- 2015
- Publisher
- Tor
- Series
- Children of Time, book one
- Awards
- Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2016
- Best for
- First contact where the aliens are genuinely alien and genuinely sympathetic
- Skip it if
- A slow, generation-spanning build will try your patience
Author Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Time is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2015 novel about a terraformed world and the two civilisations that grow on it: the last remnant of humanity, arriving from a dying Earth, and the spiders who were meant to be the experiment and instead became the inheritors. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and it is one of the best first-contact novels of the century.
The idea behind it
The premise comes from an old science fiction tradition, the uplift story, in which human beings accelerate another species into intelligence. Tchaikovsky’s version goes wrong in an interesting way. A terraforming project is set up to seed a new world with life and then nudge it, using a virus designed to speed up evolution, toward a creature capable of partnership with humanity. The project collapses. The virus keeps working. The world keeps turning, and the reader is invited to watch what the experiment becomes without its designers.
The novel alternates between two strands: the slow rise of the spiders, told across generations and leaps of centuries, and the arrival of the last human ark ship, which has its own history of failure and its own reasons to be desperate. The collision of the two is the plot, and the book is smart enough to make neither side simply the villain.
The story, spoiler-light
The spider chapters are the surprising ones. They are not a joke and they are not monsters. Tchaikovsky writes them as a civilisation: they develop language, religion, science and space travel, and they do it with the biology he gave them, which is different enough from ours to matter. Watching an alien society invent itself from the ground up is the best thing in the book, and it is done over a scale that most novels would not attempt.
The human chapters are colder. The ark ship is a dying institution carrying a dying species, and its people are not admirable. When the two stories finally meet, the question the novel is really asking becomes clear: which of these civilisations has the right to the world, and on what grounds. I will not say who wins.
What makes it science fiction
The engine is biology, which is unusual. Evolution, viruses and the mechanics of a terraformed ecosystem do the work that physics usually does, and the book is careful enough about them that the alien civilisation feels earned rather than invented. It is a rare novel where a species’ nature and its technology are the same subject.
Its place in the genre is beside the great first-contact stories, and it belongs there. It sits in the tradition of David Brin’s uplift novels and of Arthur C. Clarke’s cosmic-scale optimism, and it updates both by being far less sentimental about what people are like when they are losing.
Who should read it, and who should give it a miss
- Read it if you want a first-contact novel where the aliens are genuinely alien and genuinely sympathetic.
- Read it if you like ideas about evolution, civilisation and empire taken seriously.
- Read it if you want a series opener that stands on its own and lands.
- Give it a miss if you want a fast plot. The spider chapters build slowly across centuries.
- Give it a miss if you dislike alternating narratives. The structure is core to the book.
- Give it a miss if the thought of sympathetic giant spiders puts you off. That is the whole novel.
Where to start, and what to read next
Start here. It is book one of the Children of Time series and it works perfectly well as a standalone, though the story continues in Children of Ruin and Children of Memory. The sequels widen the idea to other species and other worlds.
If you like Tchaikovsky’s range, his work is unusually broad: the Final Architecture books are space opera, Cage of Souls is strange and dark, and Elder Race is a short, clever novella about the cost of being mistaken for a god. If what you liked was the uplift idea, David Brin’s Startide Rising is the classic version of it.
The verdict
A hugely enjoyable and genuinely original novel, and one that gets better as it goes. The spiders are the reason people remember it, but the reason it works is that Tchaikovsky is serious about the question underneath: what makes a civilisation worthy of the world it lives on. Read it for the spiders, stay for the argument.
Frequently asked questions
Is Children of Time part of a series?
Yes, the Children of Time series, but it stands alone well. It continues with Children of Ruin and Children of Memory.
Did it win any awards?
Yes. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016, one of the most respected prizes in British science fiction.
Are the spiders the villains?
No. That is the point of the book. They are a civilisation, written with real care, and the novel refuses to make either species the straightforward good or the straightforward evil.
Where can I buy it?
It is available as a Kindle edition, and the buy links for Amazon.com and Amazon.in are on this page.