Children of Time

I picked Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky from a recommendation on Youtube (what sold me on the novel again already forgotten when I finally got to it). Curiously enough this science fiction book had multiple reservations lined up and it took a while for me to get it from the library. I suppose it having received Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction of the year in 2016 may have something to do with its popularity.

In Children of Time, humanity has progressed far enough to explore the stars but an opposition has risen to protest all the technological advancements -- they think everyone should go back to living like cave people. While it's very possible for such a movement to rise, I found it extremely unlikely that it would be so numerous and dangerous to push humankind to the brink of extinction thanks to a stars-wide violent rebellion, destroying Earth and all its colonies. But that's what happens.

What remains of humanity, has lost the know-how of the old technology. Mostly frozen in cryosleep they now travel on an ark ship called Gilgamesh and search for remnants of old tech and a place to settle anew. Such a place is found at Kern's World but it is unfortunately guarded by an unwelcoming sentinel of the old empire and simply landing on the planet is out of the question.

The viewpoint protagonist on the Gilgamesh is chief classicist Holsten who is in charge of interpreting the language and tech of the past. His name is so close to Holden that I instantly pictured him as James Holden from The Expanse.

In the novel's prologue, Kern's World is about to be the staging ground for a huge scientific project: primates are to be subjected to a gene-editing nanovirus that within generations would uplift the species into sapience. The anti-advancement uprising however manages to sabotage the project enough so that the primates never get to to the planet. The virus is deployed though, and on the planet it finds something else -- Portia labiata, a species of jumping spiders. (The Wikipedia article on them is pretty extensive; I guess they have been researched a lot: likely the reason Tchaikovsky chose them.)

Spiders are not an optimal target for the nanovirus but it works, massively increasing the their intelligence over time. The spiders are followed via their own viewpoints over thousands of years and many generations, using the same few individual names based on their personalities.

I found the novel not worthy of best anything. Honestly, it's boring. Was there really no other book in 2015 to give the award to? Nemesis Games also published in 2015, for instance, was a lot more interesting. Children of Time suffers from the typical problem in scifi literature of characters being flat. And there's nothing to make up for it, no cool or new concepts. The spiders aren't interesting nor relatable. Empire of the Ants (Les Fourmis) by Bernard Werber in 1991 offered a lot more interesting and engaging scifi narrative from a non-human perspective.

To say something positive: for some short bursts, Children of Time did remind me of a type of scifi story (that I've come upon way too rarely): a huge spaceship and its crew on an exploration mission.

Tchaikovsky wrote a sequel, Children of Ruin, that was published in 2019. I guess I might as well check it out at some point. A trilogy finisher, Children of Memory, is also planned to come out in November.