Review: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s exploration of evolution, Children of Time, is a dizzying expanse of nothing and a considerable amount of something.
There’s a lot going on in Children of Time. A lot.
But that’s fine, because award-winning world building supremo Adrian Tchaikovsky has given himself plenty of time (and pages) to plunge his fingers into the mulch of his burgeoning new world to see what he can grow, what with that ol’ fertile imagination he’s got going on.
He has so much time, it’s literally dizzying. You get a mild case of vertigo thinking of space and time he offers up in its boundless dimensions. Like when you dropped that bag of frozen peas. They’re everywhere.
It’s humbling to be reminded you’re a speck. You are nothing. A tiny, tiny link in a vast chain. We live, what, 80 years. Just enough time to learn how to build a Billy the bookcase from Ikea; get heartbroken in sport and love; and programme the oven to cook a chicken next Tuesday. Then kaput.
Tchaikovsky doesn’t do kaput. He does continuums. He does long arcs and civilisations. Hand-me-down DNA and fast forwards.
The author set himself no less of a task than chronicling an evolution in this 2015 epic which won the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science fiction novel the next year.
How he pulls off the trick
Tchaikovsky gives himself a turbo charger in his version of evolution – a neat virus which is a caffeine shot for the process – but, still, there’s a lot that needs to happen for his chosen species to grow its basic urge to eat and procreate into a codified civilisation with space travel, radio communication, religion and an arms race.
Tchaikovsky’s first trick is to make this species non-human. Not even remotely human. His set-up is to have humans from a broken Earth, looking to terraform another planet (Kern’s World) by growing monkeys into humans but, instead, in a literal #epicfail their evolution virus infects spiders instead.
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And that is just half the story. The other half has an ark ship, the Gilgamesh, packed with displaced and grumpy humans, most asleep, seeking a new home, alighting upon the spider’s homeworld, being repelled by its “god” – a remnant of the haughty terraformer Kern who is now stuck in the wiring of a protective satellite – and looking elsewhere before realising incy wincy world is their last, best hope.
Putting the pi in spider
Tchaikovsky tackles the vast expanse of time but leaping between significant moments, often many thousands of years apart. For this he has two devices. The humans go to sleep, so familiar faces wake into new eras, if a bit more lined, miserable and sluggish. Whereas the spiders – whose faces are not familiar, not least because they have lots of eyes – have the same names and outlooks, but are separated by generations.
It is a feat of imagination. There must be a corkboard chez Tchaikovsky that resembles the web of Bianca the Spider’s most genius imaginations.
There’s fun to be had watching the fast-evolving spiders figuring out how to ape – so to speak – technology you would recognise but using what they have to, er, hand – more biotech than metallurgy, more silk than silicon. Yes, there’s an element of convenience, things emerging when they’re needed – a la Batman’s Shark Repellent Spray – but, still, give the guy a break, he’s just invented an entire everything and chronicled the advances too.
Minor gripes with Children of Time
Brilliant book and a staggering feat of stamina and imagination is Children of Time. Here are my gripes, for what they’re worth. The humans tend to bark a lot. They are two-dimensional most of the time (which, I suppose, is fitting as they’re flat-packed for efficient cargo-handling). The spiders are full of themselves, too clever for their own good and without frailty. You could play top trumps with the succession of ball-busting Portias.
In fact, neither species has evolved a decent sense of humour and after a while each epoch tends to resemble the last, only with new toys. The work is very diligent and clinical, but also academic and bleak.
Nevertheless the book is crammed to the engorged palps with Big Ideas. Gods and monsters; ants as bits; aliens and AI; philosophy and philology; Billy the bookcase if your books were the size of the solar system and your bedsit the Milky Way.
It’s a heady ride. You’ll need a lie down. You’ll need a heavy duvet to keep yourself grounded and a Ziplock of crushed ice for a fevered brow.