THE READING RHEUM: CHILDREN OF TIME (2015)

 

Unlike the majority of 21st century science fiction and fantasy, Adrian Tchaikovsky's CHILDREN OF TIME is a very good read, which always keeps readers intrigued in terms of what's at stake for all of the characters and for the imperiled sets of species they represent. The book was popular enough to spawn two sequels, though I don't plan to read them, as I think more "children" wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     In the far future, though humankind has pioneered space and established a small handful of colonies on terraformed worlds, factional differences between political groups have almost decimated the population. This exigency breeds two separate but intersecting reactions. The first reaction is a scientific project is established orbiting a terraformed planet, with the intention of breeding a new race of human beings. The project-head, Doctor Avrana Kern, essentially wants to play "God of Evolution" by sending to the planet a nanovirus that will promote rapid evolutionary advancement in the subjects of Kern's experiment, a troop of monkeys that will become a new race, one able to facilitate human colonization. (To be sure, Kern has a god-complex and becomes more invested in her creations than in any plans for colonization.) Much later in Earth-history, a spaceship departs from Earth. The ship and its cargo of mostly coldsleeping passengers plans to colonize that same terraformed world, unaware of Kern's project.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Bad things happen aboard the satellite: everyone dies and so do the payload of monkeys as they're sent to "Kern's World." But Kern herself survives in the form of a computer simulation, albeit one with mangled memories. And the nanovirus finds other species in which to flourish-- mostly arthropods for whatever reasons. And the foremost advanced beings are a race of intelligent spiders. Inevitably, the book leads to a face-off between the humans, desperate for survival on a new world, and the spiders, intent on protecting their own territory-- though Tchaikovsky works things so as to promote a non-combative rapprochement.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          The mythicity here is entirely cosmological in nature, as Tchaikovsky extrapolates the biology of Earth-spiders to describe the way these ET-spiders progress to a state of high intelligence and culture-- even working in a small sociological motif with regard to "male liberation" within the arachnids' matriarchal background. In fact, aside from Doctor Kern, none of the humans are any more mythic than the spiders, except as collective groups. I might even designate the two groups as subsumed by the world they inhabit, the same way that (in my system) "The Planet of the Apes" connotes the totality of apes and humans who occupy that domain.