Reading: Children of Time
Feb. 1st, 2019 07:40 pmI had been putting off reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's 2016 Arthur C Clarke award winner Children of Time because I knew it was about giant sentient spiders and I am fairly arachnophobic. And then when I finally managed to screw my courage to the sticking point a few weeks ago I discovered that I had never actually bought it, and I am trying not to buy too many books until I've got the physical and virtual to-read piles down a bit*. I was browsing Amazon the weekend before last, though, and spotted that the kindle edition was half price (£2.63 instead of £5.22), so it seemed like a good opportunity to buy it and follow through on my resolution.
The narrative of Children of Time alternates between the aforementioned giant sentient spiders, super-evolved products of a hubristic genetic experiment carried out by humans on a terraformed world which didn't quite go according to plan (the intention was to evolve new life from monkeys, but when no monkeys reached the planet the nanovirus developed to drive the evolution went to work on invertebrates instead), and the last remnants of humanity, fleeing the polluted and dying Earth and seeking a new home. The story is told in snapshots, spread out over millenia; the human characters remain constant, briefly revived from cryogenic suspension at intervals of several centuries, while although there is a new generation of spiders in every section Tchaikovsky uses the same names each time which gives a feeling of continuity.
I didn't actually find the spiders were as much of a problem as I'd feared they might be, as just reading about them doesn't convey enough of the physical sense of spiderness which sends me running from the room screaming. The descriptions of spider society were actually fascinating, and reminded me a bit of Le Guin in the way that Tchaikovsky manages to describe a really convincingly alien society, while the sections focused on the humans really managed to convey the overwhelming loneliness of their situation (at one point it actually moved me to tears on the bus). The novel certainly isn't short on plot, but it's very much a novel of ideas, about civilisation and society and evolution and history, and ultimately it's a joyfully uplifting celebration of the possibility of redemption through empathy ('the sheer inability to see those around [us] as anything other than people too', as Tchaikovsky rather brilliantly puts it). I ended up liking it a great deal, although nothing in the world would persuade me to watch a film adaptation.
*thanks to loans from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nineveh_uk and antisoppist recently, the physical pile is currently taller than my bedside table, and that's to say nothing of the books which completely fill the bedside table's cubbyhole
The narrative of Children of Time alternates between the aforementioned giant sentient spiders, super-evolved products of a hubristic genetic experiment carried out by humans on a terraformed world which didn't quite go according to plan (the intention was to evolve new life from monkeys, but when no monkeys reached the planet the nanovirus developed to drive the evolution went to work on invertebrates instead), and the last remnants of humanity, fleeing the polluted and dying Earth and seeking a new home. The story is told in snapshots, spread out over millenia; the human characters remain constant, briefly revived from cryogenic suspension at intervals of several centuries, while although there is a new generation of spiders in every section Tchaikovsky uses the same names each time which gives a feeling of continuity.
I didn't actually find the spiders were as much of a problem as I'd feared they might be, as just reading about them doesn't convey enough of the physical sense of spiderness which sends me running from the room screaming. The descriptions of spider society were actually fascinating, and reminded me a bit of Le Guin in the way that Tchaikovsky manages to describe a really convincingly alien society, while the sections focused on the humans really managed to convey the overwhelming loneliness of their situation (at one point it actually moved me to tears on the bus). The novel certainly isn't short on plot, but it's very much a novel of ideas, about civilisation and society and evolution and history, and ultimately it's a joyfully uplifting celebration of the possibility of redemption through empathy ('the sheer inability to see those around [us] as anything other than people too', as Tchaikovsky rather brilliantly puts it). I ended up liking it a great deal, although nothing in the world would persuade me to watch a film adaptation.
*thanks to loans from
nineveh_uk and antisoppist recently, the physical pile is currently taller than my bedside table, and that's to say nothing of the books which completely fill the bedside table's cubbyhole
