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?
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.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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7 January, 2018:
Finished reading
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7 January, 2018:
Reviewed