Signal Watch Reads: Children of Time

Pal Howard recommended this one.  He's a prolific sci-fi reader and eager-beaver movie watcher, and a trusted source.  He also attends ArmadilloCon each year, a convention for hardcore sci-fi literati, and we tend to get together when he's in town for that event.

A while back I asked him to recommend a favorite sci-fi book as I don't actually *read* much science-fiction.  I kind of sputtered out after Bradbury and Asimov as a kid. And I still like Asimov, Bradbury, and Dick.  I liked Solaris and Rendezvous with Rama.  But the sci-fi section of your local Barnes & Noble is not where I'm usually found.  But I figured - Howard is not going to recommend trash.  And he did not.

Children of Time is more or less what I consider hard science-fiction.  There are no wizards, no deities intervening, no space dragons.  Instead, it's all concepts with logic behind them, even if the science is speculative (at best, at times).  We're thousands of the years in the future when the book begins, and thousands more by the time the book ends.  The science injected is *possibly true* and mercifully focused in only a few areas.  One not be a polymath to follow along.

We're a star-faring race when the book opens, but it doesn't mean humanity has changed much.  We have our internecine wars, and we have people pushing the boundaries of science, so excited to see they could, they never stop to ask if they should.  In this case, Dr Avrana Kern is orbiting a planet with her crew.  The planet is terraformed, and she will (a) drop monkeys onto the planet and then (b) insert a nanovirus into the atmosphere.  The nanovirus is designed to accelerate the evolution of the monkeys.  This will, hypothetically, create a world of hyper-intelligent monkeys who will be friends and possibly heirs to humanity.  

But, a man aboard is part of a faction on Earth that is trying to circle back and stop the rapid acceleration of technology and blows up their craft.  This leaves the monkeys as ashes, the virus deployed and only Dr. Kern surviving as she uploads her consciousness to her satellite/ lifeboat and puts herself in deep cryogenic sleep.  

The nanovirus, scattered, instead infects a breed of spiders.  

Thousands of years later, Earth has been through a war that has left the planet a toxic ruin.  A cargo ship travels the stars, one of a few, the last of humanity in cryo-chambers, a small crew responding as they come upon the planet.  

Largely, this is a book of concepts and ideas.  It's the rise of one culture - the intelligent spiders - and the last days of humanity on a lifeboat, sadly chugging along through the cosmos.  It leaps forward in time sometimes a dozen years, sometimes several hundred.  Cleverly, author Adrian Tchaikovsky renames the spiders every generation with the same names so we're tracking with archetypes and don't need to learn 11 different groups of spiders.  Humans, meanwhile, come in and our of cryo-sleep, all through the POV of a the one Liberal Arts major onboard.  

Tchaikovsky is interested in the what-if's, pushing at the ideas of accelerated evolution, how civilizations advance, how they decline, the place for religious structures, the place for science, for military.  Like a lot of modern sci-fi, it twists and pulls at those ideas.  Most of it holds, some of it doesn't (there's a huge key decision in the book that is rationalized and rationalized, and I didn't buy it).  

Also, like a lot of sci-fi writ large, the concepts are the star.  Tchaikovsky isn't doing deep character work here.  Our human lead is almost a cipher, rarely responding or taking action, more often watching events unfold around him.*  But that's also and artifact of Tchaikovsky's story-telling.  Things seem to keep *happening* and occasionally a character takes actions that change the course of things, but this is not the story of how a single character or two characters impact their own world.  The scope is too big for that.  It's key moments in time across maybe 5000 years (I stopped keeping track).  Our human lead, more than our spider lead, is there to bear witness, not put his hand on the wheel.

But anyone who read Foundation should recognize this sort of sci-fi.  And it's reasonably well deployed here, but I was occasionally waiting for someone to *do* something instead of things happening.

The book is a doorstop.  Don't expect to blow through it on a flight.  It's absolutely worth the journey, and in the day since I finished it, I think I like it more the more I think on it.   

Sort-of Spoilers

I do have significant questions about the end of the book, which is oddly glossed over.  I kind of get what the author is doing and with three more books in the cycle (so far) I assume it all gets addressed.  But I was left maybe a little disquieted by what Tchaikovsky pitched for the resolution.  

This would be a terrible movie and maybe a really interesting TV series.

*writing advice generally goes hard against this sort of thing, so it's fascinating to see a beloved, award winning book with a major character who is a useful tool, but not one who strives for anything in particular.