Winner of the 30th anniversary Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel
Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed, stand-alone novel Children of Time, is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.
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?
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?
