Children of Time (2015)
600pp, Fiction
Notes
2020-10-19
Really, this couldn’t be any more different [from second sleep which I read at the same time]. It’s not operating in quite the same genre but in gereral, in every way that The Second Sleep fails, Children of Time succeeds. It’s a hard sell though: Planet terraformed by advanced but warlike human empire, terraforming goes wrong, AI satellite guarding terraformed planet goes mad, intelligent spiders evolve, humans arrive on generation ship from dying world… There’s a lot going on here and straight off the bat this is not for everyone BUT. It’s SO good. Tschaikovsky throws a lot at the wall and most of it sticks. The obvious comparison is Stephen Baxter’s evolutionary sci-fi but this is less red in tooth and claw celebrating the possibility of cooperation and consensus whilst showing how difficult to achieve and fragile they may be. Children… chucks a bunch of genre tropes into the pot and cooks up something that is original, consistently thought provoking and just general high class entertainment. Tschaikovsky is able to do this because he understands well what affordances writing in the SF genre affords to him. A real joy, right from the start.