Review: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Blurb:

A race for survival among the stars... Humanity's last survivors escaped earth's ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers?

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?

Review:

How'd I come into contact with "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky? 

First found this book in an online library, read through it. Enjoyed it immensely. Then, wonders of wonders, it showed up as part of a book package in the mail my uncle had sent over to my family. 

The premise of this book sounds like the punchline to some futuristic, perhaps even alien joke about humanity: "A damaged AI from a faulty brain scan, a bioengineered virus, some humans on a spaceship far from earth, and killer ants are sitting in a bar. The damaged AI says...". Definitely sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, at least to me. Adrian Tchaikovsky however, took that beginning of an alien joke about humanity, and ran with it, crafting an interesting meld of Space Opera, futuristic science and something akin to absolute terror about how humanity in the future might toy with bioengineered viruses. 

So, let me introduce you to a few of the interesting characters you'll find in this book: 

Avrena Kern: An egotistical scientist/genius who is leading an expedition to a planet of suitable habitation after life on earth becomes more and more unbearable due to humans being humans and the planet itself slowly, but surely riding towards an extinction event. The goal of her expedition? Using a lab designed virus that would accelerate the evolution of chimps into human-like creatures. Her goal? Being accepted as a god to her new children when they reach that point. But is that what will happen? Something awful lurks within the ship, and failure seems nigh. 

Holsten Mason: 2000 years after Earth passes into the void and starts pining after the fjords and their lost beauty, Mason awakes aboard the ark ship Gilgamesh, at a planet that was sending off a distress signal. Why are they on that planet? As the last survivors of the human race (according to them), they decided to set their sights onto a world that might be inhabitable to them and homed in on a distress signal, thinking that it would be alright and there'd be an issue they could fix. What they find however is a space pod orbiting the planet, sending mathematical equations far and wide. Mason gets woken up from his slumber in a cryochamber to help translate the code and runs into some oddities. Those oddities seem harmless, at first, but soon, it devolves into chaos aboard the Gilgamesh as old rivalries flare. 

Ants: the ants go marching on - don't need to say more than that except that the ants in this book are a mixture between Fritz Haber, the father of chemical warfare, and a mindless killing machine. Do I need to say more? Oh right, pack a mental flame thrower when you revisit this book in your mind. 

What did I enjoy about this book? 

The journey. Where at first it feels odd jumping perspectives and time frames, it quickly grows on you while you watch a civilization grow whereas another discovers the true scope and horror that is the civilization at the point they make contact. The journey, albeit spanning thousands of years is made enjoyable by again, that civilization maturing from the point of view of a species that hands memories down through those aforementioned thousands of years. And then, when the planet-side civilization narration catches up to where the sky-bound civilization is trying to figure out what has been happening on the planet. Perfect. That alone pulled up the rereading factor a lot. Personally, I've read this book two or three times to the day this has been published, and have constantly found new aspects of the journey to follow along. 

Then, the prose. Always in third person, always flowing together to create a cohesive tale that spins it all together while also keeping it unique for all the different perspectives within the book. Kern? Detached psycho narrator. Mason? Kinder, more personal narration. The Ants? While not narrated from the perspective of a queen ant, the feeling we get from them from the perspectives of the civilization spanning the world is detached, cold, logical determination. Something doesn't fit their area to what they've specified it? That thing is removed from their area. 

In extension to the prose, we have the characters. It's like the characters within the book are real, present things that I can physically reach out and interact with. The ones that were written in to cause hatred did their job just as well as the ones meant to cause hope. Going back to Kern, Mason and the ants. Kern, with how Tchaikovsky wrote her, you can really visualize her in front of you as a narcissistic genius with a tendency to verbally berate all those she finds beneath her. In her mind at least, at first. Mason, with him you can see a computer programmer, or in the books term, a classicist, who is the go to interface between old programs and the modern people. And with him, you can see how Tchaikovsky creates an annoyed, old man who wants to rest but is constantly brought back every few years from the cryochambers to decipher a new batch of code. And the ants? Tchaikovsky's description of them makes you want to find a pest remover and deant your house or yard. 

Finally, the realism. Science Fiction takes science and adds a bit of fiction to it. Tchaikovsky took that science part, looked at it for a bit, compared it to what we have today, and threw together a brilliant, realistic masterpiece that could very well come to pass if we humans are idiotic enough. 

What did I not enjoy? 

Honestly, hard to say. Actually, there is one thing. Some parts, specifically the civilization parts, feel like a national geographic narrator got set up in front of a camera with the typical script and read it aloud. Despite that being there, it is, for me at least, a mild hindrance to a tale that brings about the most interesting twists and turns it takes to it's ending. 

This book has a wonderful journey leading to one of the most amazing conclusions leaving the choice to the readers whether they want to stop there or continue on with the second book. 

One thing I haven't mentioned, and something I probably should mention now is that the civilization on the planet is made up of spiders. If you dislike spiders, or have arachnophobia, I'd recommend finding another book to read, since the spiders take up a large portion of the book. And although the spiders take up a lot of the book, they feel human. They feel... akin to us, with how they interact with both each other and the fact that their history so closely mirrors our own when the history of the spiders and the history we have have never interacted with until a specific part of the book. 

All in all, as the conclusion to this review, I have to say that I was immensely entertained by the world and surprised at how fast the time flew by when I got to rereading it. I hope this review has helped you find a book you'd enjoy, and if it hasn't, we here at SFF always have more recommendations that you can check out besides this one!