A Symphony in Book Form: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ‘Children of Time’

“Let others become gods of mere single worlds. She herself would stride the stars and head up the pantheon.”

Thousands of years in the future, the last dregs of humanity launch a mighty fleet of generational ark ships from the war-ravaged and dying Earth in one desperate attempt to send groups of sleeping scientists soaring across the centuries to the abandoned star systems of the old empire armed with the technology to accelerate new life on any suitable planets they might happen to stumble upon during their long and lonely odyssey. Only one ship has survived, and only one planet has been found. But another form of life has risen to claim the solitary green world for its own…

Children of Time is a tempestuous symphony in book form seething with the devastating magnitudes of hope and humanity that only the grandest of space operas can deliver. It was also terrifically disturbing, as the biggest arachnophobe I know, to find myself weeping at the fate of a ginormous sentient spider in a spaceship.

The entire premise is, in essence, intoxicatingly sleek. I’m a firm believer in the fact that the intricacy, cohesion, elegance, and tension of a book’s plot are directly correlated with how commercial it is, and so to me commerciality requires one simple question: how good is the story? The most sumptuous, lyrical prose ever written in the history of literary endeavour would be utterly ineffectual without a heart-pounding, attention-consuming plot. This is why my favourite book of all time is The Secret History by Donna Tartt (“density and speed“), a story captured in microcosm in its very first line. How and why did a group of five students in wintry 1990s Vermont come to murder one of their closest friends? *chef’s kiss*

Similarly, Children of Time can be distilled into one soul-stirring question: what if there was a planet in the far-flung future where a completely different species evolved into the apex predator that would assert global dominance and mine the secrets of the universe?

The kernel of this story, as Adrian Tchaikovsky articulated at Tor’s MCM comic con blogger brunch in May 2019, was the evolutionary quirks of the portia labiata, the infamous South East Asian jumping spider, with its crazy acute eyesight, malicious hunting tactics, and epic matriarchy. And so, spiders became the apex species at the heart of his space opera.

The book begins with Doctor Avrana Kern, the chief scientist in charge of the project that will transform the green planet into a new Earth. Like Star Trek’s Genesis Device, the plan is to do in thousands of years what would ordinarily take hundreds of thousands, but instead of geology, this project affects genetics. She intends to unleash a nanovirus on a colony of monkeys and, from the time capsule of cryostasis in her orbital space station, oversee them as they swiftly evolve. But this is also the day when the Empire falls. By the time they get word of the galactic war that sees the destruction of much of humanity, it is all over, and as the ecoterrorists attempt to sabotage Kern’s grand scheme, she hurls herself into an escape pod and initiates stasis as the station implodes behind her. What she does not know is that the virus was indeed deployed on the world below, but the monkeys were not the recipients.

Enter the spiders *she says in parentheses*.

Over the next few thousand years, they evolve into a master race guided by the generational memory of a holy trinity of pioneers whose names are recycled along with their genes. There was the first Portia to wonder, to look to the stars, to imagine. The first Bianca to ponder the assumptions and expectations of her world, and question the mechanics behind it. The first Fabian to challenge the rules of his society and propose cultural upheaval. And together they unthread the webs of mystery that have so suddenly been brought within their evolutionary grasp by the genetic enhancement of Kern’s nanovirus.

One of the most effective masterstrokes of Tchaikovsky’s genius is in the tense of these arachnid perspectives – not the tension, the tense. I’ve never seen anything like it. Whereas the human chapters are related in past tense, their very evolutionary decline woven into the grammatical building blocks of the language that describes them, the spider chapters are told in the present. It’s both seamless and stunningly impactful. Humanity are the relics of then, spiderkind the custodians of now. They are, quite literally, the children of time.

“Late that night, she sits in the highest reaches of Great Nest, staring at the stars and wondering which point of light up there is whispering incomprehensible secrets to the crystals now.”

“When it strikes the ground, well within the ant colony’s scouting range, it has lost a great deal of its speed, but the impact still resonates through their sensitive feet as though the whole world has just cried out some vast, secret word.”

As for the humans who constitute the other half of Tchaikovsky’s bewitching behemoth, foremost among them is Holsten Mason, soft and helpless classicist and Key Crew member aboard the monstrous Gilgamesh. The latter is the last ark ship known to have survived the intervening millennia between the fall of the Empire, Earth’s new ice age, and the vast odyssey since. We follow his existentially fraught struggles to parse the imperial breadcrumbs leading them across the stars, picking apart dead languages and long-forgotten signals as he is brought in and out of stasis. From warrior queen Isa Lain, the icy and unapologetic chief engineer who keeps her emotions barricaded safely behind walls of maraging steel (mood), to the self-aggrandising Vrie Guyen, commander of the Gilgamesh and supreme caller of shots, the Key Crew do not make Holsten’s life easy, and it all comes to an apocalyptic head when they detect an ancient and inexplicable signal transmitting from the orbit of the impossible green world.

“It was life, and only now did Holsten realise that he had never really seen Earth life, as it had been intended. The home he remembered was just a dying, browning stub, but this… Gently, almost imperceptibly, Holsten felt something breaking up inside him.”

This book also has one of the most horrific character deaths in all of literature. IT HAUNTS ME STILL. And the moment I wept? It involved dancing… that’s all I’ll say.

Ultimately though, the most emotionally arresting gut punch this novel slings at the reader is in the exploration of that so quintessentially human propensity to exalt in the ability to destroy, and the huge question of whether we can aspire to something better.

Children of Time is space opera written with the voice of fantasy and it instils the same je ne sais quoi as the likes of Interstellar. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to read a Hans Zimmer score, look no further.

“Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”