Adrian Tchaikovsky

Follow-up to City of Last Chances, it follows one of the characters—an embittered priest who can’t seem to get rid of his god of healing—who’s captured by the fascist Palleseen and put to work in an experimental hospital, where they allow otherwise forbidden magics if they’re in the service of healing Palleseen soldiers. The various characters all have their reasons for aiding the war machine, from ambition to dull acceptance, and the key question of the book is whether there is anything in the future but relentless horror for them. I quite enjoyed it (despite this description!).… (lisätietoja)

This is sort of Mash by way of Perdido Street Station, or a dirty dozen of conscripts and criminals deal with what comes out of the grinders of war waged by the purifying army of Pall. Pocket Gods down to their last worshiper give service in the hospital tent of the Butcher in an army that consumes Gods to fuel the weapons and machines of its wars, deals with demons and herds ghosts. An army which has no place for a healed soldier who, according to the rules of the God who brought them back from the brink of death, can do nothing to harm another person without being immediately un-healed. It takes the length of a rather long book to work it's way through to a significant conclusion, but no reader can say it wasn't telegraphed.… (lisätietoja)

Children of Time is the first book in a trilogy of the same name by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016, and the trilogy was awarded the Hugo for Best Series in 2023.

I really enjoyed this novel, which is cleverly done on several levels, tackling some big themes including the future of humanity, god-like technology, and xenophobia.

We start with the point of view of Dr. Avrana Kern, whose personality at the start of the novel seems based on someone like Margaret Thatcher, arrogantly certain that her view of the world is the correct one.

In the far future humanity has developed the ability to travel between stars (though at less than light-speed) and to terraform planets to make them suitable for human habitation. The expedition led by Avrana Kern, however, has a more ambitious project: to raise up another species to sentience. The planet she egotistically dubs "Kern's World" has already been successfully terraformed and seeded with a wide variety of Earth plants and lifeforms. Now the plan is to introduce a large contingent of monkeys, alongside a virus which should speed up their evolutionary development. Freed from the historical baggage of humans on Earth, what kind of being and society will develop here?

Alas for Dr. Kern, her mission is sabotaged and her starship destroyed by a radical group fighting against the idea of interfering with the evolution of other species. Kern alone manages to escape into an orbiting satellite. Unknown to her, the landing craft containing her "barrel of monkeys" burns up in the atmosphere and all the monkeys are killed.

However, the capsule containing the evolutionary virus does make it down to the surface. The virus was tailored so as not to affect other mammals which might compete with the monkeys. In their absence, however, it finds receptive non-mammalian hosts. One of these is a species of jumping spider, Portia labiata, and the virus begins its slow work.

The story then splits into two parallel streams. One of these streams deals with the slow evolutionary development of the spiders, which become larger and more intelligent as time passes, to the point where they have a recognisable civilisation. Some wonderful world- and culture-building here, with the spider society based on webs and the control of other species such as ant colonies.

The other stream deals with the remnants of humanity, in desperate search for a new home. Many thousands of years after Kern's experiment goes astray, an ark-ship, the Gilgamesh, leaves a ravaged Earth carrying all that is left of humanity. They are delighted to find a green world apparently perfectly designed for them. Alas, they are to be disappointed.

In both streams of the story we are introduced to interesting characters (though admittedly none of them have any great depth). In the spider stream we have characters who the narrator dubs as "Portia", "Bianca", "Viola" and "Fabian" though of course these are not their real names. These notional names are re-used as the generations pass, and serve to give us a feeling of continuity, although the individuals involved differ. In the human stream the most important characters are Holsten Mason, a "classicist" who has studied the ancient culture from which Dr. Kern came, and can help translate; and Issa Lain, the female Chief Engineer of the Gilgamesh.

Each of the narrative streams is full of interest in its own right, and I certainly won't attempt to try to detail all of what happens in the novel.

Let me just say that it’s a testament to Tchaikovsky's skill as a writer that when the inevitable, existential conflict occurs between the spiders and humanity, I found myself wanting to cheer on the side of the spiders.

I though this was a terrific work of hard science fiction, a really engaging and often very thoughtful story with many interesting twists and turns (I particularly liked the fight for gender equality in the spider civilisation). Yes, you could claim there's not a lot of character development or depth, but even on that front it compares pretty well with most works of hard SF.

I'll certainly be going on to read the rest of this series, and I'll also be checking out some other books by Tchaikovsky.… (lisätietoja)