I have mixed emotions upon discovering an author like Adrian Tchaikovsky. First comes the excitement and delight of finding a great read from an author who has multiple books available. Next comes remorse. I could have started reading Tchaikovsky years ago.
Children of Time was a surprise, and it’s a bit difficult to review without giving too much away. There are multiple wonderful reveals in this book.
Here’s the official blurb: 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.
Tchaikovsky has done his homework and created a wonderful hard sci-fi novel with a deft enough touch that you don’t get clobbered by the science. Well done! On the Feral Scale, it comes in at a 9 for story and a 9 for science. I also appreciated the very subtle, and much appreciated, nod to David Brin’s Uplift series.
It’s a great read. A sequel is available and I’ll add it to my stack.
Nit, spoilers, and scary pictures follow. Be warned.
The novel depends heavily on suspended animation in order to bridge the hundreds of years required to travel between stars. I’m willing to accept that. The inconsistency comes in when addressing where and how the sleepers, or “cargo” are stored. There are something like 500,000 of them, yet they seem to be laid out as we see in many sci-fi stories. Nicely arrayed in a one-deep grid with room between them to make access easy. If we assume each storage unit is 3 feet wide by 8 feet long, that’s 24 square feet. Now add some room to move around next to each unit and we’re talking 4 feet by 10 feet. Multiply this by 500,000 and you end up with 20,000,000 square feet of floor space for storage. That’s around 400 football (or soccer) fields. Much easier and space efficient to store them like bodies in a morgue. Even more so to just store embryos. If you’re worried about the future of the human race, more is better.
Spiders. That’s what ends up being the dominant land-based critter on the new world. The way it happens is well thought out, and I bought in. Less so for the ants. I also wondered about the efficacy of a genetic engineering virus designed for primates having almost zero impact on other mammals while working so well on arachnids. Still, the whole story worked so well, I had to think a bit to find flaws.
That’s it.