“Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky is an ebook about a dying species and the evolution of a new one.

Earth and Mankind are in their last throes. As a chance to save some semblance of Earth, a rocket is sent into space to a planet with a nanovirus and a payload of monkeys. The hope is that they will evolve into a more intelligent species. When the monkeys are destroyed, a new life form emerges on the planet that is quite different than planned. Thousands of years later. A new rocket full of humans wants to make its home on this very planet but they may find it more inhospitable than they thought.

I liked this story of evolution and survival. I found the idea of a somewhat abhorrent species being the subject was an unusual choice but I really enjoyed the speculation of how they might evolve differently than humans or monkeys.

Simple the best sci fi novel of the 21st century. I've always identified with Tchaikosvsky (we both have a zoology and psychology background) but this is where he transcends genre and becomes a master writer.

I’m not 100% sure if I actually enjoyed reading this book or not, but I think this might be one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve ever read.

That surprises me, because I haven’t given it 5 stars and I had some problems with it – I didn’t love this novel the same way I love some of my favourites like Feed or The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – but wow. This is a good book.

Set in a future in which humans have ruined the earth, the last of humankind are aboard a ship seeking a new home. Some years before they set off, an experiment gone wrong has given sentience to creatures on a planet that would be perfect for mankind to make a fresh start on, but how are they supposed to start again on a planet literally crawling with giant spiders?

Children of Time spans thousands of years, watching a new species evolve while mankind sleeps through space, searching for somewhere to settle, and it’s epic in the truest sense of the word.

This novel rewards patience and, I must admit, I didn’t have a lot of it at times. Nothing really feels like it’s happening for the first third of the book, but all that build-up is needed so you get the full scope of the story by the time it draws to a close. I did feel like I was waiting quite a long time for anything to happen, though, and I think part of that was because I assumed the majority of this book would take place on the planet, with mankind fighting for ownership of it with its eight-legged occupants. I’m not sure where I got that idea from, but I’m glad I stuck with this book when I realised that wasn’t the case.

Honestly for me its biggest weakness is how much I didn’t care about the human characters. I did like Isa Lain a lot – I’m sure no one who’s read the book is surprised given how much I love my grouchy women in SFF – but when we’re with the humans we follow them through the eyes of classicist Holsten Mason who, for the most part, I found incredibly annoying. I kept waiting for him to do something, but he’s the kind of character who just lets stuff happen to and around him instead and that made the early human chapters, in particular, very boring to read.

Holsten was often out of the loop with what was going on, being woken every few hundred years to show us how things were progressing with mankind, and I just didn’t find following him around that fun. He didn’t seem to have a personality.

By the end of the novel I did care about the human characters a lot more, and they and their story needed to be there for this book to work, but this novel could have been a 5 star all-time favourite if I’d cared about any of the characters at all in that first third. I need characters I can root for. I don’t have to like them, I just have to be invested in them.

All that aside, I did love the spiders.

I know. I’m just as shocked as you are.

For full disclosure, I’m severely arachnophobic and have been my whole life. Earlier this year I went in the shower and sobbed for a full 10-15 minutes after a spider crawled into my t-shirt, and it’s only really this year that I’ve found the courage to catch spiders under a glass and put them outside. Before I had to get someone else to do it, and even now, if the spider’s particularly big, I’ll cry and shake while I’m putting them outside.

So I think it says something for Tchaikovsky’s writing that he made me care so much for the arachnids he created. I loved the world and culture he built up around them, and how he was able to explore gender inequality by flipping it on its head in the spiders’ matriarchal society where, for many years, the males are seen as mentally inferior and only good for mating.

I think I enjoyed the sections following the spiders most not only because we actually got to know them better as characters than the humans, but also because their sections read like a fantasy novel to me. As I’m sure most of you know, I’m much more of a fantasy girl than a sci-fi girl at heart, so reading about their laws and their priestesses felt like stepping into a strange, new high fantasy world.

I did find some of the earlier scenes a little difficult to read. I definitely got the heebie-jeebies more than once, but once I got used to the spiders as narrators I started to like them more and more, and when the novel switched back to follow the humans I just wanted to see what the spiders were doing. I never thought I’d say that in a million years.

I can’t say this is an easy read – a lot of the science and technology stuff still went over my head because I’m just not science-brained in the slightest – but it’s not difficult, either. It’s a challenging book, but that’s no bad thing, and even when I was getting frustrated that nothing was happening I still kept going back to it because I just had to know what was going to happen next. That’s not a skill all authors have.

After being sure I was going to give this book 2 stars when I first started to read it, I finished Children of Time completely in awe of what Tchaikovsky has accomplished. I completely understand why this book won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and why it’s been rated so highly. I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time and while I’m in no rush to get to Children of Ruin, because frankly my brain feels like it needs a break, I’m definitely up for returning to this world in future.

That’s right. I want to read more about the spiders. Who even am I?

Enjoyed this, what I would call 'proper sci-fi' and well written. The only negative for me that it was perhaps a bit too long and I found myself skipping parts. However it was an excellent story, well put together, but I must admit I didn't want to read it at bedtime (did not want to dream about the inhabitants of the green planet!).

Review of an advance digital copy from the publisher.

Llego tarde a la lectura de Children of Time, la novela de Adrian Tchaikovsky premiada con el Arthur C. Clarke. Esto no es algo raro, es imposible leer todas las novedades interesantes que se publican en la actualidad. Pero intento subsanar mis errores cuando las recomendaciones de los gurús son tan unánimes.

El libro está dividido en dos tramas, con protagonistas muy diferentes pero destinados a encontrarse. Por un lado tenemos a los humanos que pretenden terraformar un planeta para habitarlo y que hacen uso de un nanovirus para que los "monos" que ellos mismos llevan al planeta evolucionen y realicen este proceso de adecuación del planeta al ser humano. Una crisis interna hace que este proyecto no salga demasiado bien, y la especie que evoluciona en el planeta son las arañas.

Cada capítulo está dedicado a una de las dos razas que querrán vivir allí. Mientras que en la parte de los humanos la historia se desarrolla como en una nave generacional, con sus pros y sus contras, la parte de las arañas es un relato de evolución apasionante.

Con Spiderlight Adrian ya se desveló como un aracnólogo aficionado, pero en esta ocasión se descubre una verdadera pasión por estos animales. A lo largo de un periodo de tiempo muy vasto explica las modificaciones que van sufriendo las arañas en su evolución, tanto a nivel biológico (cambian su forma de respirar para permitir que su tamaño sea más grande) como a nivel sociológico (dejan un tanto de lado sus instintos depredadores para buscar la colaboración de sus congéneres). Es fascinante como aplica las particularidades de esta sociedad para mostrar un desarrollo necesariamente distinto al humano, pero no por ello menos exitoso. La forma de desarrollar la computación, por ejemplo, es sorprendentemente razonable y creíble.

El autor utiliza también otros recursos muy adecuados para esta parte del libro. El periodo vital de cada araña es inevitablemente corto, pero para que consigamos cierta identificación y continuidad con los personajes utiliza los mismos nombres para distintos individuos con características similares, aunque no sean coetáneos.

Las arañas, que son una sociedad eminentemente matriarcal, le sirven a Tchaikovsky para hacer reivindicaciones sobre igualdad de género, al poner a los débiles machos en una posición de indefensión y sometimiento a los deseos de las hembras. Incluso se permite algún que otro atisbo de humor, como cuando habla de ver "quien tiene las patas más largas" en los momentos competitivos.

Por desgracia, la mitad "humana" de la novela me parece más floja. La mayoría de las escenas las vemos a través de los ojos de un personaje lacónico, al que parece que le falta sangre en las venas y que influye poco en el desarrollo de los acontencimientos. Es más bien un espectador que un actor, aunque realice ciertas acciones necesarias para el avance de la narración.

Debe haber sido difícil cuadrar los tiempos de evolución de cada una de las tramas para conseguir aunarlas en el momento adecuado y creo que Adrian lo consigue de una manera elegante, aunque no perfecta. En ocasiones parece que alguno de los dos hilos está esperando a que suceda algo en el otro. Esto, que puede ser una percepción personal, parece más acusado en la parte humana que en la arácnida.

Children of Time es un libro estupendo, con unas partes brillantes y otras que no desmerecen el conjunto. Será publicado en España por Bibliópolis durante este año.