The Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is one of the most brain bursting books I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. I picked it up knowing nothing except it was sci-fi and contained two warring factions and boy am I glad I did. Children of Time is epic. It takes place over billions of kilometres, eons of time and encompasses hundreds and possibly thousands of generations of human beings and more. At the same time it is incredibly focused, tells minute stories of individual moments between different players and draws you into this incredible world that has not yet come but could easily be. The earth is dying and has sent out in best and brightest to terraform other worlds but political upheaval and nature fanatics have crippled the technological systems of the human race sending it back to the stone age whilst a single satellite containing a single doctor is left orbiting humanity’s last hope. Intending to populate her planet with monkeys and an evolution virus that speeds up the natural process things go awry when the monkeys burn and the virus finds itself an arachnid host. Generations later the survivors of earth have once again repopulated, once again screwed things up and following the footsteps of their predecessor’s have taken to the stars to find a new home. Following the star maps of the ancients they find the terraformed planet and this is where the fun kicks off. There were some moments that were a bit on the technical side but I pushed through them and never got overwhelmed. The reader is not expected to be a scientist but having a decent vocabulary will certainly make this a bit easier, and a good imagination is a must have. The way Adrian builds the arachnids from basic animals of instinct to the point where they are literally a space faring race is just incredible. It’s actually hard to believe a human could write this and I loved the story of the spiders just as much as the human side of things. If you are after some serious sci-fi, some mind bending matrix level shit, I highly recommend picking this one up. This was 600 pages I was not expecting and I got through it in four days. I can’t wait to get some more books by Tchaikovsky. This was a 10/10.