Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I finished Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky a while back. I can’t give a detailed review of it - or even a synopsis of the plot - without dropping spoilers, but it’s a good, meaty hard sci-fi book about evolution and terraformed planets and the drawbacks of being locked in a cryochamber for centuries, and other things. SECRET things. SPOILERY things. 📚

CoT won an Arthur C Clarke award. There’s a lot of big, expansive themes in the book that remind me of Clarke’s writing, so it makes sense.

The main character is a classicist! I thought that was cool, since you don’t often see the arts being represented so strongly in science fiction. I immediately liked him because you could tell he was just an introvert who wanted to do his nerdy little job and not deal with, you know, people, which I think a lot of us can relate to.

The book started out slow for me because there was a lot of sci-fi lingo that was hard to keep track of, but I acclimated within the first 50 pages or so and it kind of snowballed from there. I think part of what helped me is that Tchaikovsky writes dialogue beautifully. People talk naturally here; they sound like people. It’s something I’m picky about.

Let’s see. . .there are also spiders. I am not a fan of spiders. I prefer not to think about spiders at all, ever. But the spiders in CoT did not bother me. Just a heads up though if you are really, really not a fan of spiders, though: there’s a lot of detailed descriptions in this book. A lot of pedipalps. A lot of skittering. I’d advise you to still give it a chance if it sounds good otherwise, though. I’d explain more, but SPOILERS.

So yeah. If any of that appeals to you, pick this one up. It’s about 600 pages but it went quickly after the rough start. There are a few more books in the series, apparently. I get a little apprehensive when I find out that books I love as a standalone story are actually part of a series, like I’m worried that the ensuing books can’t possibly be as good and that will in turn lower my opinion of the first one. On the other hand, the rest of the series gets wonderful reviews from people I respect, so I’ll certainly give the next one a try.