Children of Time
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Children of Time (Children of Time, Book 1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The smartest sci-fi book I’ve ever read (too smart for me) 😵🤯
Children of Time is a great book in the same way that Schindler’s List or 2001: A Space Odyssey are great movies. They’re no doubt classics, extremely well thought out, depicted in an almost visionary way, and unappreciated until they’re over and you think back on them; but throughout the experience they often become boring and hard to follow. Children of Time suffers from this same problem: great book, if you can get through it. And you really have to be paying attention in order to fully understand it (which I wasn’t). But I still respect, appreciate and recognize it for everything it does.
As I said, it does get a little boring and hard to follow, I got kind of tired of learning about all the anatomy and culture of the ants and spiders, but I understood why it was necessary. Children of Time excels pretty much everywhere, but has an especially unique approach to contrast. It puts a heavy focus on evolution, specifically accelerated evolution as one of the storylines follows the indigenous species that have evolved through human uplifting hundreds of years ago (there’s a little more to it, but I’m keeping it basic here, I’m not joking when I say the story is complex), which is why all the anatomy and culture are so important. During which, its portrayal of non-human main characters is so good, you almost forget that they’re not human. At the opposite end of the spectrum, another storyline has you following the few humans remaining in the galaxy as they begin to descend into barbarism out of desperation to survive while searching for a new home planet (again, there’s a little more to it).
I love the multiple storylines and how they ultimately converge, the concept of human meddling and mortality, and the sense of what it means to be left behind in the grand scheme. With the sheer complexity of its story, the themes it tackles, and the uniqueness in which it does it, Children of Time is highly ambitious and epic in its scope and time-scale. Definitely check it out if your up for some heavy reading.
