Children of Time

paperback, 608 pages

Published June 4, 2015 by Tor.

ISBN:
978-1-4472-7329-5
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4 stars (9 reviews)

Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.

Who will inherit this new Earth?

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.

5 editions

A modern, classic sci-fi tale

5 stars

This was a great book and I see why it has won awards and is generally regarded in a positive light. While the characters are basic, they are nonetheless interesting and the plot is straightforward enough to keep the focus on the setting. The setting is excellent and the way the two societies, one human, one spider, is explored is clever. I enjoyed both viewpoints and wish we had gotten more time after they merged together, but maybe that is a story for the second novel? I look forward to reading the other novels in this series and finding out.

For a full review, check out my blog: strakul.blogspot.com/2024/06/book-review-children-of-time-by-adrian.html

Children of Time

4 stars

This feels like the most "classic scifi" book that I have read in a long time. Spaceships! Evolution! Cold sleep! Ark ships from a ruined earth! Aliens! Consciousness upload! Space battles! I'm half-joking here, but rather than trite, it felt refreshing to read this more classic space opera story as a change of pace from my usual fare.

The story is told through two parallel perspectives, one following the historian Holsten Mason (a classicist of now-gone earth empires) on an ark ship and another following the historical development and intelligent evolution of spiders on a terraformed planet. Both perspectives are told over great swaths of time: pictures of important moments in spider history as they evolve, but also flashes of human experience as well between cold sleep as they try to survive with what's left of humanity. If anything, despite following the same major characters, the human narrative is just …

reviewed Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Good ending, didn't care for the human portions

3 stars

Content warning Discussion of the ending

Kinder der Zeit

3 stars

Schwer zu bewerten. Es gibt zwei parallele Handlungen von denen die Eine - die Menschen - gar nichts taugt. Derartiges gab's schon zig mal in den letzten 60 Jahren Sci-Fi - und davon viele auch deutlich durchdachter. Bleibt die Geschichte der Spinnen - Im Großen und Ganzen auch recht vorhersehbar, aber es gibt da einen Aspekt der wieder für Vieles entschädigt: Die Spinnen-Technologie.