Thursday, May 16, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky



Children of Time is a SciFi novel released in England by Adrian Tchaikovsky back in 2015, which managed to win at least one decent award back then, and which has just now been published by Orbit at the end of 2018.  One of my friends at work was singing its praises, so I've had it on reserve from the library for a while.  Still, the book is essentially an example of a SF subgenre which I've never really particularly loved - the "Generation Ship"* subgenre, in which the novel jumps forward repeatedly throughout in time to follow the next generation of characters/the-setting.

*Children of Time doesn't actually feature a Generation Ship - a ship for travel between the stars in which generations live their lives on the ship in the hope that their distant ancestors will eventually reach their destination - but features the common elements to these books, namely generation jumping, that I am generally less enthused so I'm counting it.*

 The reason I've never particularly loved this subgenre is that it's a very idea focused subgenre, more than a character-focused one, with the focused-upon characters changing multiple times throughout and not getting much development.  This is indeed the case with Children of Time, in which there are essentially two parallel though connected generational chains being followed throughout, for the story to compare and contrast.  The ideas in question - the growth and evolution of species and the values of cooperation being the major ones - are solid, but the characters aren't really, so I didn't find myself as in to this book as I have others...it just wasn't really for me.


---------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------
In the distant future, Dr. Kern is about to unleash a grand human science experiment: having finished terraforming a planet, she is going to launch a set of monkeys to the planet below, and infect them with a nanomachine virus that will speed up their physical and mental evolution, so that when humanity follows, it can have a sibling race waiting to greet them.  But just at the moment of her triumph, rebellion against such scientific progress arises, resulting in devastation to the human race, both back on Earth and on the station above Kern's world.  The only survivors are Dr. Kern, who uploads her mind into the remnants of the station, and the nanovirus, which goes down to the planet below.

Thousands of years later, humanity has re-emerged, and to escape the dying Earth has set out upon the space ship "Gilgamesh," searching for a planet terraformed by the Old Human Empire where the species can once gain live.  What they find on Kern's World is a hostile satellite which threatens their destruction, and the products of the virus, which has evolved something very different from what Dr. Kern ever anticipated - rather than evolving primates or mammals as intended, spider-like creatures have been the beneficiaries of her work.

As Holsten Mason, an expert on Old Empire language and culture, repeatedly wakes up from cold sleep on the Gilgamesh, he finds that the fate of humanity onboard is only getting more and more dire....and that they may not be able to avoid a confrontation with the evolving species of Kern's World,a confrontation that will change the fates of two species......
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After the initial prologue section, Children of Time alternates sections between following what's happening on Kern's World - as the spiders continue to evolve and change - and what's happening on boards the Gilgamesh, with each segment of the book dealing with an individual generation of the spiders at the same as dealing with another generational period onboard the Gilgamesh (essentially each time Holsten wakes up and finds things have changed).  Each spider generation contains characters of similar names - Portia, the brave leader; Bianca, the inquisitive female willing to buck convention; and Fabian, the very intelligent Male who defies gender conventions - while Holsten's sections contain his fellow original members of the crew amidst other people onboard the ship who change. 

Still, despite the same characters (in Holsten's case) or same character archetypes existing in each era, none of the characters really emerge as interesting in and of themselves.  Oddly, it's the spider characters who come the closest to being interesting, as their individual archetypes result in new discoveries and developments in spider society as they continue to evolve, from discovering how to deal with competing species, to dealing with discrimination at the heart of their society, to dealing with seemingly heretical ideas of religion.  Even though Bianca, Portia, and Fabian (as well as a few other recurring spider names) aren't the same individuals from era to era, their personality types remain similar enough for them to seem like we know them from era to era, allowing the stories they get involved with to capture our attention and interest.

The same can't really be said of Holsten's stories and the stories of the humans onboard the Gilgamesh.  The book generally has a central concept - cynical as it is - that humans cannot be trusted to cooperate for the greater good of their whole species, with the failure to do so repeatedly causing conflicts between the leaders and others onboard the Gilgamesh.  But the book never really gives us a good idea of who these leaders ARE - from Holsten, to chief engineer Lain, to ship commander Guyen - or why we should care about them, so every story in each era featuring them just kind of didn't connect with me, especially at first.  The book needed to develop who these characters were, but never does before throwing them in there, making them less interesting and just feel like skeletons moving in ways just to cause conflict throughout.

Still, despite the weakness of the human segments, the plot as a whole does work, with the contrast between the humans and spiders in each era working well enough.  Again, it's more than a bit cynical with the central theme being about how humans' initial response to things is conflict and not to consider the greater good, and to compare that to the spiders, who are trained by the nanovirus to share understandings and to work for the greater good.  It all ends up with a satisfying ending, with a minor sequel hook which will be followed up later this year.

Still, I'm not going to be onboard most likely for that follow-up, as I suspect it'll be another idea-focused story as opposed to a character-focused one.  I mean again, Children of Time works, unlike some of these books I've found, but it isn't really the type of story that keeps me enthused, so I'll skip the sequel.
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