Children of Time (2015)
Children of Time is a 2015 fiction book written by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Humanity's last survivors flee a poisoned Earth in a cryogenic ark, steering toward a green world their ancestors terraformed for colonists who never arrived. That planet already has heirs. A failed uplift experiment seeded it with spiders, and across deep time a species of Portia evolves language, faith, and cities of silk, shepherded by the fractured mind of the scientist who meant to make apes. Adrian Tchaikovsky braids the two histories, patient generation after generation, until the sleeping refugees and the arachnid civilization drift onto the same orbit. Empathy and terror share the page in a story about who deserves to inherit a world.
Quick answers
What is Children of Time about?
Humanity's last survivors flee a poisoned Earth in a cryogenic ark, steering toward a green world their ancestors terraformed for colonists who never arrived. That planet already has heirs. A failed uplift experiment seeded it with spiders, and across deep time a species of Portia evolves language, faith, and cities of silk, shepherded by the fractured mind of the scientist who meant to make apes. Adrian Tchaikovsky braids the two histories, patient generation after generation, until the sleeping refugees and the arachnid civilization drift onto the same orbit. Empathy and terror share the page in a story about who deserves to inherit a world.
When was Children of Time published?
Children of Time was published in 2015.
Who made Children of Time?
Children of Time was written by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
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A few thoughts on Children of Time
Fans should try Mass Effect 2, which stakes its story on speaking with alien minds rather than shooting them, and the concept album Universal Migrator, Part 2: Flight of the Migrator, Ayreon's sweep through cosmic deep time. For the same lonely grandeur on screen, Interstellar chases a habitable world across relativity, and Project Hail Mary turns first contact into wary cooperation between species.
Hard science fiction spent almost entirely getting somewhere
Children of Time spends thousands of years getting its two civilizations onto the same orbit, and this set shares that patience with distance and time. Project Hail Mary and Interstellar both stretch a rescue mission across years of travel, Arrival treats first contact as a puzzle in communication rather than combat, and Old Man's War fights its wars across a galaxy too vast to cross quickly.
Species that turned out exactly as their creator designed them, more or less
The spiders in Children of Time evolve exactly as far as Dr. Kern's uplift virus pushes them, for better and worse, and these stories share that anxious bond between creator and creation. Phoenix follows life mutating across Tezuka's vast timeline, Appleseed imagines a city of genetically engineered citizens built to a plan, and BioShock and BioShock Infinite both show utopias where every citizen was shaped to fit someone else's ideal.
Isolated societies that survive for generations on someone else's rulebook
Children of Time's refugees survive for generations by obeying rules laid down before they woke from cryo-sleep, and these shows and books share that inherited-system anxiety. Silo's underground families live by regulations nobody remembers writing, The Handmaid's Tale traps its women inside someone else's designed order, Stargate SG-1 keeps finding civilizations built around one ancient culture's leftover technology, and Thunderhead lets an AI's authority define what a good life means.
Cold, futurist concept albums built for deep time and alien worlds
Children of Time keeps its tone cold and precise even as it spans millennia, and these albums build entire science fiction worlds in the same register. Black Holes and Revelations and Simulation Theory both score paranoid, futuristic unease, Deltron 3030 raps an entire empire and rebellion into existence, and Repo! The Genetic Opera turns a biotech dystopia into a full rock opera.