Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “What have you done with my monkeys?” Or “Humanity is overrated” Or “What’s wrong with us?” Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2015) fuses hard science fiction like Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1953), in which human space explorers and the sentient centipedes of another planet find a way to communicate and collaborate, and soft science fiction like Ursula Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost” (2002), in which a multigenerational voyage from earth to a habitable planet leads to interesting psychological and cultural situations. Thereby Tchaikovsky’s novel complicates military science fiction like Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959), in which humanity must destroy or be destroyed by their “arachnid” or “bug” enemies. And his book does all that in an Iain M. Banksian literary space opera mode: believable characters, imaginative extrapolations, unpredictable events, serious themes, page-turning action, and the sublime, here relating especially to time. Children of Time opens in the far future with an experimental project for which scientists are to deposit 10,000 monkeys onto an Edenic terraformed world and then to enhance their evolution by releasing onto that world an “uplift” nanovirus (David Brin is a foundational presence here, as Doctor Kern’s spaceship is called the Brin 2). A man from an anti-uplift faction from earth, however, destroys both the Brin 2 and the “barrel of monkeys” before it can reach “Kern’s World,” with Doctor Kern (and her divinity-sized ego) escaping into a Sentry Pod to orbit “her” world so as to wait for someone from earth to come rescue her. Then she copies her consciousness into a computer simulacrum (just in case) and enters cryogenic sleep. Shift to the terraformed world and its Portia labiata jumping spiders, who, unbeknownst to the sleeping Doctor Kern, are being uplifted by the nanovirus. The chapters featuring the meter-long spiders, who have developed a female-centered peer-group civilization, are fascinating, as Tchaikovsky extrapolates from spider biology while employing humanizing empathy tricks. With their three-dimensional mapping and predator problem solving, palp waving and foot tapping language, use of domesticated aphids and ants, public courting and mating followed by the larger female typically killing and eating the smaller male, and lack of parent-child relationships, the spiders are alien to our species, but we care about them. Their gender imbalances satirize our own biases against girls and women: e.g., “It is well known that males cannot really feel as deeply as females or form the same bonds of attachments and respect.” And the “soft” spider technology is neat, based on biochemistry, symbiosis, and silk (versus our “hard” technology of metal, fire, and light). A third story strand concerns Professor Holsten Mason, a classicist academic from thousands of years in Doctor Kern’s future, a man chosen to join the Key Crew of the arc ship Gilgamesh and its “cargo” of 500,000 human beings as they follow the burnt out satellites, void-mummified bodies, and derelict colonies of Doctor Kern’s ancient Old Empire in their attempt to find an appropriate world to colonize to continue the human species. Two thousand years ago, the Gilgamesh left an earth rendered uninhabitable when the toxic mass weapons of Doctor Kern’s Old Empire finally thawed out from an ice age. The relationship between Holsten and the Chief Key Crew Engineer Isa Lain is interesting and increasingly poignant, especially concerning time and aging. Lain initially nicknames Holsten “Old Man” because he’s fifteen years older (as well as being 2000 + years old due to having been in cyrogenic sleep that long), only to have their age difference begin changing as Holsten spends more time in cryogenic sleep while Lain spends more time awake dealing with various arc ship emergencies. Tchaikovsky is good at presenting people, including human beings (from a distant future past or a distant future future) and uplifted spiders in terms of how they’d think and act and speak when coming into contact with very different others. And because he does such a fine job of developing his characters, the inevitable intersection of their cultures in the plot becomes suspenseful and exciting. He critiques our own civilization (and human nature) via his future human (and spider) civilizations. Halsten sees “Those ancients, with their weapons and their waste, who had brought the end upon themselves” as “antique psychopaths” living in an “intricate murderous” civilization, “A vanished age of wonder and plenty and an appalling capacity for destruction.” And although due partly to their biology and partly to the nanovirus the spiders are more oriented towards empathy and absorption rather than hatred and destruction, they also at times evidence traits and sub-cultures that reflect back on our own. Many chapters begin on the knife edge of some crisis for the characters and their civilizations. The ways in which the spiders react and change in the face of existential threats from things like an uplifted ant empire’s expansion, a horrific plague, and the inevitable visit from the Gilgamesh, make for compelling reading. As do the crises of identity Doctor Kern experiences in trying to figure out how much of her personality is hers and how much her computer’s, as well as the different crises faced by Halsten et al, ranging from mutinies to cults on the Gilgamesh as the centuries pass in its seemingly never-ending journey to find a home. As does the question the novel poses: whether sentient beings of such different species (i.e., people of such different cultures) can see one another as anything other than monsters. The audiobook reader Mel Hudson is fine. She does different English accents for different characters (seeming to use Australian ones for down to earth characters); she reads with intelligence and awareness and pacing and emphasis and enhances the novel. Fans of well-written, character-driven, fast-paced, thoughtfully-themed sf should like this book. View all my reviews
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