Review: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Review: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

by Rich Horton

Adrian Tchaikovsky* made his name with a long fantasy series, Shadow of the Apt, then began writing SF with this novel, published in 2015. Along the way he's published a fair amount of short fiction, and I reprinted one of those, "Dress Rehearsal", in my 2017 Best of the Year volume. So Tchaikovsky was on my radar -- and when Children of Time won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, I knew I needed to read it. But -- I sometimes have a hard time getting to novels! I recently bought the third book in the trilogy, however (it was at a convention, and they didn't have the first two!) -- so I finally got the audio version of this first book and read it. (By lucky coincidence it turns out that the book is even my book club selection for next month -- something I didn't realize until after I started it!)

The audiobook is read by Mel Hudson, very capably. I always enjoy hearing an English accent (especially for a book written by an English person) -- kind of emphasizes the whole "separated by a common language" thing. With an English reader, I usually find words pronounced differently from the American way, sometimes almost comically -- there really is NOT a second "i" in the word "specialty"! Except -- apparently in England "speciality" is an accepted alternate spelling! 

Children of Time opens in a star system 20 light years from Earth. Dr. Avrana Kern has been leading a terraforming effort, and now she is ready to release her crowning achievement -- a set of monkeys to inhabit the planet, and a virus engineered to accelerate the monkeys' evolution into an intelligent species. But at the last moment, the effort is sabotaged, and Kern ends up marooned in orbit, the rest of the terraforming station destroyed, her monkeys having burned up in atmosphere. But we soon learn that the virus did make it to the planet's surface, and, having no monkeys to infect, instead it finds some other species -- particularly a variety of spider. Kern uploads herself into a computer, and her physical body goes into suspension. And down on the planet, the spiders begin the process of what we might has well call uplift.

Some two millennia in the future, civilization on Earth is all but finished. War destroyed the Old Empire -- driven by the same political rift that motivated the saboteur of Kern's project. The few survivors of the succeeding ice age have managed to patch together a few "Ark Ships", sending the crews (in suspension along with the "Cargo" -- the potential colonists) to the worlds they believe the Old Empire terraformed. The Gilgamesh has arrived at "Kern's World" -- but Avrana Kern awakens to meet them -- and warn them off, for she wants her world preserved for what she thinks are "her" uplifted monkeys. By this time her physical self is insane, and her uploaded copy more or less constrained to obey the insane part. Holsten Mason is the "classicist" assigned to the Gilgamesh's crew -- an expert on the old Imperial languages they expect to find at the terraformed sites. So it is Holsten who learns to understand Kern. His best friend becomes the head of Engineering, Isa Lain, whose job it is to understand the Imperial tech they encounter (and to maintain the the Gilgamesh.) Antagonists (of a sort) are the Captain, Guyen, who has a barely sane Messianic streak of his own, and the head of security, Karst.

Down on the planet, the spiders have achieve a fairly high level of intelligence, and are beginning to build societies. Tchaikovsky uses an interesting device to maintain continuity with the spiders over their many generations -- he calls three main characters the same names generation after generation: Portia, the adventurer/explorer; Bianca (or "Bee-anker" in Britspeak!), the scientist; and Fabian, the revolutionary male. (In spider society, females are larger and dominant -- and they often eat their mates -- one of the crusades of one of the Fabians is to make that practice illegal.) 

We follow the growth of spider society -- increasing use of technology (especially biotech); increasing social cooperation and organization; a battle with ants for territory followed by harnessing the ant colonies for various technological uses, such as a biogical computer; and, crucially, contact with Avran Kern, whom they call the "Messenger", a god who for centuries has been transmitting mathematical equations, hoping to hear the correct solutions from what she believes will be at last "uplifted" monkeys. More or less in parallel we see the struggles of the Gilgamesh -- an attempt to evade Kern's quarantine of "her" world, an attempt to travel to the next terraformed world down the line, which fails terribly; and a return to Kern's world for a last ditch effort of take possession of the world now owned by the spiders. All this leads to a desperate final battle, as the human history of ecological disaster and genocide threatens everything the spiders have built, with only Mason dimly realizing how wrong this is. And it leads to a striking and quite moving conclusion.

The novel is really cool old-fashioned SF. There is effective use of some traditional SF ideas -- the Gilgamesh becomes in essence a generation ship, and some familiar generation ship tropes are nicely deployed. Even better is the speculation about spider society, and the really neat ideas about how they think and use tech, etc. They do come off, perhaps inevitably, as a bit too human in some ways, though Tchaikovsky tries to avoid that. (The wonderful revelation of what the character is Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky are really like doesn't happen in this case.) But that isn't a big problem, and in a way is key to the resolution (and, I presume, to the sequels.) It's a lot of fun, and I'd say it deserved its Clarke Award.

*(I love the story of Adrian Tchaikovsky's penname -- he's English, of Polish descent, real name Czajkowski, but his publishers wanted a name English people could pronounce -- so they suggested Tchaikovsky, pronounced the same (I assume) as his real name, but easy for English readers to recognize because of the composer.)