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Children of Time
May. 18th, 2019 08:53 amThis is the second book I've read by Adrian Tchaikovsky and I definitely want to read more!
Children of Time is set in the far future, after humans have made the Earth uninhabitable and mostly destroyed each other. It has two separate storylines. One follows the ark ship, Gilgamesh, with the remains of humanity in suspended animation, heading out into deep space, looking for a new place to live. The other is set on a planet that has been terraformed with the intention of making a new human habitat, but where the experiment has gone awry and the uplift virus has infected all the insects.
What's so great about it is that the two disparate set of characters don't really co-incide until right near the end, but the inevitability of them doing so is what drives the plot forward and creates a huge amount of tension.
The scope of the book is massive both in terms of time (the timeline spans at least 2500 years) and space (the Gilgamesh travels to multiple star systems), but it works because it gets you invested in the characters. What's even more impressive is that, by the time the final showdown eventually happens, I was on the side of the spiders, and rightly so.
The last few pages are maybe a tiny bit abrupt and too easily reconciled, but it was largely a satisfying ending to a really great book that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Children of Time is set in the far future, after humans have made the Earth uninhabitable and mostly destroyed each other. It has two separate storylines. One follows the ark ship, Gilgamesh, with the remains of humanity in suspended animation, heading out into deep space, looking for a new place to live. The other is set on a planet that has been terraformed with the intention of making a new human habitat, but where the experiment has gone awry and the uplift virus has infected all the insects.
What's so great about it is that the two disparate set of characters don't really co-incide until right near the end, but the inevitability of them doing so is what drives the plot forward and creates a huge amount of tension.
The scope of the book is massive both in terms of time (the timeline spans at least 2500 years) and space (the Gilgamesh travels to multiple star systems), but it works because it gets you invested in the characters. What's even more impressive is that, by the time the final showdown eventually happens, I was on the side of the spiders, and rightly so.
The last few pages are maybe a tiny bit abrupt and too easily reconciled, but it was largely a satisfying ending to a really great book that I thoroughly enjoyed.
