Review of “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchalkovsky (Sci-fi novel)

Well readers, I really should have been studying for upcoming interviews but I can always waste tomorrow doing that instead. This novel, the winner of the 2016 Arthur C Clarke was well worth it and a real gem. It’s hard to know exactly to start. It’s a long read at over six hundred pages.

It covers many different themes, some of which are God, alienness and what exactly that means, and the difficulties and duration of space travel for a level of technology that humans might approximate in the next century.

In the far future Dr. Avrana Kern is the head of a science team that has terraformed an uninhabitable torus shaped planet to make it suitable for life. A genetically designed virus to speed the evolution of monkeys is then released. But that is where things start to go wrong. There is a revolution, then a war of annihilation that breaks out throughout the empire. This affects the science vessel too and the monkeys who are the intended target of the virus burn up in the planet’s atmosphere.

Instead, it acts on different species but has the largest impact on spiders/

We are then introduced to an Ark Ship called The Gilgamesh that is the last remnants of humanity and looking for somewhere to settle down. Earth has been poisoned by the Old Empire.

What follows is a fascinating journey through space and time. What most impresses me about the novel, is how the spiders follow their own different way of technological improvement and the pure genius of the author to imagine it all. It really feels like you are being given an insight into something somewhat familiar, yet so alien.

Needless to say, this masterpiece gets five stars out of five. The movie rights have been sold but I think it would be impossible to truly bring it to the big screen. Like all the spider communications would have to be subtitled and would people want to look up close at spiders for so long.. It definitely wouldn’t be as good as the book.