In a recent post, I commented that I rarely read up-to-date books. As I said at the time, that’s not because I have a problem with them; it’s just that I have such an enormous backlog of older books to read, that I rarely have time to pick up recent releases. But today, I’m making an exception; I’m taking a leap forward into the last five years (sorry, those of you who were hoping for a present-day release, this is as close as it gets, I’m afraid!). Welcome to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2015 award-winning novel, Children of Time.
Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not read this book! I’ll attempt to limit spoilers to the early chapters, but no promises!
I should backtrack a bit and make a confession: Sometimes I am a bit skeptical of present-day works. Of course this is nothing new in history, but many works of fiction—and especially science fiction—are a product of the social issues at large in the world at the time of their writing. That’s not a problem in itself; the issues at hand are real, and need to be addressed, and it’s not at all wrong for authors to address the issues about which they’re passionate. But my day job is in a field where I already confront many social issues face-to-face on a daily basis; and when I read for pleasure, I’m usually looking for escapism. Perhaps that’s one reason why I favor books from previous decades; while those authors also were incorporating the issues of the day, the day itself has changed, and those issues are no longer current. Past passion becomes present escapism.
Children of Time occupies a unique position. It certainly builds on technological concepts that are current (or possibly near future), but it mostly avoids present-day social issues. The book takes place over the course of several thousand years, but those millennia are viewed in snapshots, with large gulfs of time between—thus, our present with all its problems becomes the distant past, and new issues arise. The book opens in the advanced future of our Earth, at a time when humanity has colonized the solar system and reached out to the stars. Doctor Avrana Kern is a proud and arrogant scientist, devoted to a terraforming project on a distant world, an experiment which is about to come to fruition. She and her team have developed a nanovirus that encourages and aids evolution, pushing species toward sentience and civilization. She plans to seed the new world with monkeys—chosen for their closeness to humanity—and then with the virus; and then, after a few centuries of accelerated evolution, her subjects will contact an observing satellite left in orbit. However, she is betrayed by a spy among her team, a member of a radical group from home, and her ship and teammates are destroyed. Kern herself is the only survivor, escaping on the observation satellite, where she uploads a copy of her mind into the ship’s artificial intelligence, and then puts herself into stasis. However, although the virus survives, the monkeys are destroyed upon reentry to the planet’s atmosphere—leaving other lifeforms to benefit from the virus’s ministrations. Kern is left unaware of this development. The story then shifts to the future, and showcases various stages in the development of life on the planet, paralleled by the story of a sleeper ship from a now-devastated Earth, in search of a new home.
I had read some reviews of this book prior to reading it, and was aware of the high acclaim it had received—notably it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction of the year in 2016. I was concerned that it would fall into the same trap that besets so much science fiction (including some of Arthur C. Clarke’s works!): that its ideas would overshadow its characters. I worried even more about this when I discovered that the book was structured as a series of vignettes spread over a vast period of time; I was certain the characters would get lost in the overarching story. I was very pleased to see that this isn’t the case. On the human side, you have, first, Dr. Kern, who starts out as a bit of a caricature, but becomes slowly more human in character over time—which is ironic, as she becomes increasingly less human in the physical sense. Then you have the main character, one Holsten Mason, a “classicist” who studies the now long dead works of the “Old Empire”, the human civilization of which Kern was a member. Mason is a part of the “Key Crew” of the sleeper ship Gilgamesh, meaning he isn’t one of the thousands of colonists frozen in storage, but is one of the ship’s actual crew. He is awoken from cryosleep several times throughout the story—with centuries between instances, usually—to help with various crises, and eventually to help save the ship and its crew and cargo. Mason—along with a few other members of Key Crew, including his occasional lover, the engineer Isa Lain—provide us with a steady perspective despite the time jumps, and serve to tie the story together. Meanwhile on the planet, Kern’s nanovirus is taken up by various lesser species, most notably a few species of spiders, who develop in unprecedented ways. The spiders themselves live and die in normal lifespans; but Tchaikovsky lessens the impact of this segmentation of the story by recycling names. In all, we only get about four names for various spiders, but they are recycled in each generation along ancestral lines, and so we get a feeling of continuity even in a discontinuous narrative.
I repeatedly ran across comments to the effect that the book is reminiscent of older science fiction novels, of the era of Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and others. It’s hard for me to pin down exactly why that would be so—what exactly is it that’s distinctive about that era of science fiction?—but I have to say that I agree. There’s a feeling to this book that is very different from the science fiction I was reading between the late 1980s and the mid-2000s. The book is complex without being incomprehensible; suspenseful without being grim or dark; hopeful without being naïve. I have considered that this may be in part because of the way Tchaikovsky portrays the crew of the Gilgamesh; they come from a world that has pulled itself up out of the ruins of an old world, and they are still in a way very young as a society. They have been through some terrible things, but they lack the cynicism of modern America and Europe, while also lacking the wide-eyed utopianism of, say, Star Trek. They have no illusions—they know at all times that they are the last of the human race, and their survival is fragile—but they also aren’t jaded by the things that led to this situation. That attitude spills over into the tone of the book in general, and it’s refreshing.
Overall, it’s a great story, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it so. I can’t speak for the rest of Tchaikovsky’s work; I was surprised to learn that he’s been quite prolific, and that this is perhaps his twelfth or thirteenth novel, as I had never heard of him before this book. That’s most likely because I tend to pay attention to science fiction and fantasy; this is his first science-fiction novel. I may check out more of his work at some point, but not soon—unless a sequel is announced! But I hope that that doesn’t happen. Some works are worthy to stand alone, and don’t need—indeed, would be diminished by—sequels. This is one of them. (However, the prospects for such a thing are by no means settled—the book has been optioned since 2017 for a film, and we know Hollywood loves sequels. So we’ll wait and see.)
At any rate: This is a little short today, but I’ll end on a positive note: Go read this book! You won’t be disappointed.
Happy reading!
It’s a new year, and a new reading challenge! What are you reading this year? Having unfortunately not met my goal last year, I’ve scaled back a bit, to thirty books in 2019; so far I’ve completed seven. You can join me on Goodreads, and post your own challenge!
Timewalkerauthor 