Children of Time - book review

 

 Children of Time

Author: Andrian Tchaikovsky

Published: 2016

Publisher: Pan Books

Rating: ★★★★☆

 (Picture credit: amazon.in)

Team of Avrana Kern is headed to plant Chimapzees onto the “Green Planet” which is previously terraformed. They intend to infect the Chimpanzees with an engineered virus that would accelerate their evolution into intelligent beings. As the spaceship blows over the planet killing all the Chimps and human crew, Avrana Kern escapes in shuttle that establishes itself in the orbit of the planet. The nature of the grand evolutionary experiment changes as the virus that is accidentally spread into the atmosphere of the planet finds itself readily infecting another species introduced previously on the planet, spiders. The spiders, enabled by the virus evolve in their own way revering the “Messenger” that moves periodically over the sky.

Another ship with one of the last groups of human survivors arrive at the planet in search of building a new home for their species. Will the “messenger allow them? Are they ready to face the new kind of intelligence evolving on the planet’s surface? Are they ready to come out of their human nature to cooperate and work together? The author presents a story that is entertaining as well as almost always plausible given the initial conditions. I highly recommend reading it if you are interested in science fiction and evolution.

Things I liked

This book is part of a series and kind of tells a tale of two beings in parallel doomed to clash with each other in the end. I found both of the part interesting throughout the book. I usually, get bored in reading one or other part of the tales in some of the other novels that I have read. The book describes realistically how a group of people would behave and evolve when trapped in a ship for centuries intermittently waking up from the ship. At the centre is Mason Holsten who is a classicist and is always woken up when something important comes up. Every time he does, he finds himself in a different kind of society that is evolving on the ship. A society that is led by people with different nature. The book also thus tells how the nature of our leaders affect what kind of culture we develop. How strong leaders can lead their people to achieve a civilized society or become the same animals that we have evolved from.

The depiction of evolution of spiders is mind blowing. The writer tells us their stories though the representative spider leader Portia, Bianca and Fabian, defined by their characteristic talents and potential, over several spider generations. Evolution is blind. It builds upon what is available at each previous time point and what selection pressure is given to whatever is present. Some characters are lost and some are conserved and modified. Author splendidly imagines how spiders would evolve into intelligent being. An intelligence of their own kind.

Things that I didn’t like (spoiler alert!!)

There not much to dislike. Only have doubts if the spiders would in such a way without knowing how to make things sterile (bacteria/germ free). Also, the concept of assimilating knowledge by eating knotted spider silk is somewhat difficult to digest for me. But that is how it should be. We can't really comprehend how other organism process information.