Children of Time

I meant to read this book ages ago, but my dad (who never reads) picked it up off my bookshelf while visiting and took it back to Kansas. I finally resigned myself to not getting it back and grabbed another from a used bookstore. I’ve only read one other book from Tchaikovsky, and this confirmed that I like his books a lot, but they’re probably only for when I’m in the mood for something on the more breezy/readable end of things. 

Elevator Pitch:
A planet was terraformed, meant to be home to monkeys infested with an evolutionary super-virus to help them prepare a civilization for humans to inherit. Things went wrong, and invertebrates ended up with the virus instead. We follow two societies across thousands of years: the spiders who raise from a simple hunter/gatherer society into spacefaring astronauts, and a spaceship carrying what may be the last of humanity, seeking one of the homeworlds. They will only briefly interact in this book, as their storylines largely remain separate but for a few discrete moments in time. 

What Worked for Me:
Children of Time gets pitched as a cool worldbuilding exercise: spiders from Earth are handed a lush new planet and juiced with evolutionary steroids. It absolutely sells on this premise. We see spiders shift from larger and more intelligent versions of Earth spiders to spacefaring bioengineers. We’re fed snippets of important moments throughout their history: the fall of capitals, the spread of plagues, the invasion of ants, the scientific breakthroughs, the challenging of gendered laws. It always feels very rooted in exploring different ways society could develop had humans not been the nexus that broke the intelligence barrier. This is a society that developed the radio before their first wheel. I constantly found myself engrossed in the ideas. When I teach my fantasy writing unit, I start with a lesson on ‘what if’, allowing students to creatively extrapolate as a seed for storytelling. This was a really good ‘what if’, and Tchaikovsky executed it well.

Now, would I classify any of this as hard science fiction? I would not. You get some cryogenesis on the human side to explain how people survive the extreme journeys of space, but Children of Time primarily leans on the rule of cool, and Tchaikovsky’s accessible writing style facilitated this. I pulled this book out at the sushi restaurant while eating alone before a choir concert. I stayed up late reading it. The straightforward prose and drip feeding of badass cultural advancement in spiders kept me itching to see when the next timeskip would occur, and how Tchaikovsky would reimagine scientific and cultural milestones through the lens of arachnid culture. It was a 600 page novel that felt like 350. 

What Didn’t Work for Me:
This is going to sound odd considering my previous praise, but I wish Children of Time had been less readable. I wanted it, well, the spider bits, to feel more alien and unsettling. I wanted the prose to sink me into the mind of a spider with a hyper evolved brain who isn’t like us at all. We got a taste of that in some of the human sections and their interactions with the ancients or their technology. Instead, Portia’s story was so readable that it was almost mindless. In fact, her sections are very emotionally removed from her. Occasionally the narrative zooms in to explore some facet of spider psychology, but mostly I feel like I’m listening to a posh Brit narrate a nature documentary.

The exaggerated space between each copse is a firebreak – something the spiders are very familiar with. Their planet’s oxygen levels are higher than Earth’s – lightning-sparked fires are a constant threat.

Tchaikovsky distances us so much from the mind of spiders that our narrator knows that humans exist (which the spiders certainly do not) and also is aware that this book is a story being told to humans who need Earth reference points. Tchaikovsky gives us a meta-narrator, though he wrote it into a book where a meta-narrator should not exist.  These techniques succeed in Framing Narratives, but it makes traditional fantasy formats artificial and brittle. It was readable, breezy, but limited the amount he could push the spiders as an alien life form to humanity, which is a core plot component in the moments where they do meet.

If we’re sticking with the nature-documentary style, I wish the human chapters had been limited to the absolutely necessary. Their sections just aren’t that interesting. We follow a classicist translator, but his crisis of faith about worshipping ancient humanity is underbaked as a thematic throughline. There’s a lot of travelling back and forth, dramatic conversations, and ‘fate of humanity’ tossed around, but not much of substance actually happens. Even when ship politics do spiral out of control, I don’t feel a ton of tension because their reconnection with the spiders is a moot point. It feels like the human chapters exist to preserve an every-other-chapter synergy, filling time until they become important to the spider’s story again. As it stands, I was rushing through the humans to see more spiders. That is a sentence I never thought I’d type. 

Conclusion: a wickedly interesting evolutionary science fiction story paired with a boring human spaceship political plotline

• Characters: 2
• Setting: 5
• Craft: 3
• Themes: 3
• Enjoyment: 4