Children of Time

Emily's Review

When I saw a copy of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time a couple of weeks ago in a thrift shop, I wasn’t sure whether to pick it up. The copy had been through some rough times, its pages circled by seemingly random words in bright red pen. However, I decided to take it home with me, and was absolutely rewarded for my efforts.

Children of Time is an epic science fiction saga spanning thousands of years in a quest to uncover the secrets of evolutionary biology and the nature of the human race and other intelligent species. Millennia after the human race all but wiped itself out in global technological warfare, the descendants of that golden age of information are trying to claw their way back to the knowledge their species once held. But as the earth’s natural resources continue to degrade, these remaining survivors piece together a poor imitation of their ancestors’ spaceships in a last-ditch attempt to find a new habitable space in the ancient humans’ experimental terraforming planet. However, the experiment being run on this lush green world did not die with the Old Empire of the human race: a controversial scientist’s attempt to accelerate the process of evolution has yielded successful, if unexpected, results. Living on the planet’s surface is (a quick warning for any other arachnophobes out there) a fully developed, uniquely complex society of intelligent spiders. As the two civilisations hurtle towards confrontation, they will each learn how far they are willing to go for survival. 

What makes this novel so beautiful for me is its deeply post-human point of view. The spiders’ civilisation is a direct foil to our humanity. Though they experience many of the same formative historical events as we did — from the development of language to the construction of gender politics, plagues, religious crusades, and a technological revolution — they respond to them with a distinctly different approach from our own. While humanity’s history is one of destruction, the spiders’ is one of creation, interconnectedness, and an empathetic relationality that allows them to thrive in ways humans never could. Tchaikovsky boldly claims that our human intelligence is not determined by the universe or the culmination of all development, but rather by a mere accident of evolution that could just as plausibly arise from any other combination of biological factors. He thus exposes our hubris; our tendency to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of the natural world. 

In a similar way, Tchaikovsky explores our relationship with technology. When a regular human life can be extended by thousands of years via technological integration, is it still a regular human life? And if not, is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe, in chasing a kind of digital consciousness, we lose something that is inherently human, but perhaps we also gain something completely different. I consider these voyages into the boundaries between human and non-human (be it machine or spider) a fascinating critique of the concept of humans as independent beings. After all, no organism is truly self-sustaining, and understanding this could be the key to unlocking a more inclusive future. 

The novel’s world-building and understanding of interdisciplinary knowledge is, simply put, incredibly cool. The descriptions are painted so vividly that reading the book feels like stepping into the vast and fluctuating network of webbing built high in the trees of the spiders’ green planet. Tchaikovsky’s studies of zoology and psychology seep into all his characters, human, non-human, and everything in between. Motivated by conflicting desires — to create or destroy, to preserve or innovate, to conform or defy — the cast of this novel provokes endless moral quandaries that will have you constantly reforming your opinions of them and their ideals. If Tchaikovsky can make even me, the most adamant of arachnophobes, fall in love with a race of giant sentient spiders, I’m sure he can have the same effect on you.  

If you have any interest in biology, sociology or history (or if you are just after some exposure therapy for your own arachnophobia), this book should absolutely be your next sci-fi read. A stunning introduction to Tchaikovsky’s works, Children of Time will alter your perception of our future in a universe that’s both indifferent to humanity and yet filled with endless possibilities.