Children of Time: Winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award (The Children of Time Novels, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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?

• ISBN10: 144727329X
• ISBN13: 9781447273295
• Publish Date: 4 June 2015
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 31 March 2016
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Imprint: Tor
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 608
• Language: English

Reviews

[ayla_abbott]

Didn't expect that ending. More hope than we deserve.

[pamela]

10/10. No notes.

I can't believe it took me this long to finally read this book, because it's just a masterclass in plot, world building, pace, and conflict. 

My biggest problem with this book is that it jumped around so much. I felt disconnected from everything that was happening, because the next chapter, we would be a few hundred years further. There were enough pages, but not enough time to connect with any character.

[HekArtemis]

6 out of 5 stars, this was just truly amazing. I wasn't bored for even a single second, even when it wasn't action filled, it was still compelling. The depth Tchaikovsky went to with the spiders was just superb. The fact that we can be made to feel for them, even root for them over humanity... Just wow. The parallels drawn between real world human history and current society, but with spiders and let's be real the spiders do it all better eventually. And the way it looks at sexism but sex swapped so males are the oppressed.

I found the time aspect to be super interesting and honestly terrifying. The idea of going into stasis and awakening in some unknown future, every time more and more unsure of what hell had happened this time, who had you now, what do they want from you this century? Poor Holsten. But then the spider timeline is generational instead. It was an interesting view of things. I think never really knowing for sure just how much time has passed each time was a good way to do it too.

Ah so much I could say. Whatever, it's a fantastic book. I am almost too scared to read the sequels cause how can they live up to this?

[adamfortuna]

One of the best books I've ever read. When it comes to science fiction, there's a lot of the same out there. Tchaikovsky writes an entirely original story with amazing characters - not all human.

The premise is this: Earth is in the process of terraforming a new planet to make it habitable. The plan is to contaminate this new world with a genetic virus that will cause the monkies there to become more sentient in the far future. Something goes wrong (we're still in chapter 1 here) and instead a planet of insects are grown.

The most impressive part of this entire story is the focus on insect chemistry and what it would look like for a planet of intelligent spiders to rise. They face many of the same issues we do in our society today - gender rights (although the main issue is to allow males to NOT be eaten after mating), societal structures, trust, communication and math. The approach to solving these issues is entirely insect based, and some of them blew my mind.