Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Publisher – Tor UK

Published – Out Now

Price – £3.99 Kindle eBook £9.99 paperback

Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age – a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.

Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

Our relationship with nature and it’s many forms of life is ever-changing. We once saw it as ours to do with as we please and all creatures in it served us. These days we are aware it’s a more balanced partnership that humans all too easily and regularly mess up. We still don’t see other forms of life as equal to ours. Science fiction has long explored what other forms intelligent life can take and imagines beings who can be far worse or better than humans. But how do they get there? Adrian Tchaikovsky explores intelligence in their Children of Time series and for this part of a short series we go to the 2015 novel that started it all and made many readers review their relationship with spiders – Children of Time. I was pleased to discover it still stands up as high-quality science fiction.

The human race has started to leave for the stars but has brought it’s many squabbles and arguments with them. Some see technology as the only way forward and others few it as taking us down a blind alley towards destruction. Doctor Avrana Kern loves technology and has a plan to seed a world with uplifted monkeys to do humanity’s bidding. However, a saboteur quickly sends things wrong and the special virus she has created for added intelligence fails to meet its payload. Instead, it arrives on a world where a small simple spider will become the beneficiary of this gift and from small things great adventures will triumph. But humanity’s own final survivors millennia later think they may want their world too.

Tchaikovsky here adapts the idea of uplift (you’ll note on page one a tribute to David Brin its creator and let’s also use this to pay respect to the man who passed this week) and does something so impressive and for many readers new – an exploration of evolution and intelligence. Portia an 8mm jumping spider is not what we would think of as the most likely candidate but and I think crucially why this story work is that the uplifting here just adds a tiny additional spark of intelligence that allows co-operation. A simple concept that will like a stone in a pond create ripples across many many future generations. Tchaikovsky then brings us into various time jumps to see how the species has developed. It is akin to reading a wildlife/history drama where the passion and admiration for spiders comes through and makes us see a spider (which many like myself tend to fear) and see them as complex organisms with their own society and skills. They grow (and grow) taking over their planet as the dominant life form. The book explores concepts of biology, science, religion and technology. The novel takes imaginative leaps as to how would over many generations these creatures become first self-aware and then fully aware of the universe around them and interact with it beyond seeing it just as good or things that want to eat it.

To aid the viewer Tchaikovsky has a central cast of names who reappear in different guises for each generation. Portia our curious and intrepid heroine; Bianca who can be cunning warrior or scientist and Fabian a male and who is often thought of as just a tool (or food) and yet challenges the status quo. So over what to our characters seem ancient history we almost see them as the same characters just experiencing growth and development from their previous experiences. Another clever idea is that the spiders develop Understanding – knowledge that can be passed to the next generation and also helps us see each Portia for example as ‘ours’. Moving from being a hunter to being an explorer or a scientist in a huge and global society we witness battles against their greatest enemies the ants and even a debate on who is god. All these mini adventures are investing us in this world’s fate and making us worry about what happens when this smart, fascinating society meets its ‘creators’ the humans. Without these characters the story would have been very dry and I think they’re a crucial part to the story’s accessibility and when that’s done to giant spiders you know the writing is paying off!

In between the spider sections of the novel, we jump to a small spaceship containing some of the last human beings alive. While for the spiders each generation is doing better and exploring their world; in contrast the human society that was already falling apart thanks to political tensions starts almost to devolve into a cruel faction based row within its spaceship (an inner world collapsing). The most sympathetic character is Holsten who holds knowledge of humanity and technology and for me this is the crux of this book. Can better natures ever win out?

Evolution for humans and spiders has been learning to look beyond our basic emotions and fears; working together and taking leaps into the dark (how apt our heroes are jumping spiders). Whenever we give into our basic desires we tend to go for instant win; immense violence and very little else. Tchaikovsky slowly builds the tension as the two groups ever circle each other finally cross paths. For the reader knowing what humans can be like we fear that the only outcome is going to be bloody. Tchaikovsky’s solution is smart, hopeful, and as we will see actually allows larger tales to come.

One final fascinating element is Karen herself. We see her as a wily human who does what she pleases at the start of the book but thanks to technology she managed to appear throughout. She too represents another form of intelligence the artificial kind and she is a more amoral and strange character who also has to find a way out. Which adds to the tension ad to which side she chooses?

Reading this again seven years later I was pleased how well it holds up. The sense of wonder is palpable. It uses biology to explore how a species can thrive and then moves that more into sociology as to how intelligence can move forward through the application of science and technology but with a warning that these things can go back (which feels a lot more prescient this side of a painful few years). One important thing I note is I do see spiders differently – yes still prefer them on the other side of the room but these days I tend to want to leave in peace. Superb quality science fiction and well worth your time!

Join me in a few days for my thoughts on Children of Ruin!