First impressions review: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Like ‘The Pull of the Stars’, this is a book I bought as a Christmas present - in this case for my evolutionary biologist husband - thought “eh, I might as well read this before I give it away”…and it totally sucked me in. How to describe this book? It is kind of like what you would get if Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Foundation’ books (the ones that span centuries of an institution trying to tweak societal development) and Ursula LeGuin’s “let’s see what happens to society if we change biological detail X” approach (eg. ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’) had a baby. But the selling point for me was the spoiler that there is a spider civilization in this book. And, oh my gosh, did it deliver!
The inciting incident of the story comes about because of a dispute over a terraforming project overseen by Dr. Avrana Kern. One of her subordinates is a mole who sabotages the project and blows up the ship. Kern escapes in a pod that was meant to orbit the new planet, keeping the occupant in suspension, until a special nanovirus jump-started the evolution of the monkeys released there to the point that they could communicate with humans. The problem is that the conflict – which also is occurring on earth – basically wrecks our home planet and leads to the extinction of the colonies on Mars and other planets that were not self-sufficient. Two thousand years later, a ship full of refugees from earth arrives at the terraformed world, and Kern/her computer upload self are not happy to see them. She’s very protective of her “monkeys”. The thing is…there are no monkeys. They never reached the surface, so the nanovirus has been working on something else instead: Portia jumping spiders and other arthropods.
Now, I should note here that I love jumping spiders – with their fluffy bodies and forward-facing eyes they are about as cute as an arthropod can get, and quite clever as well. So I was already ready to root for them more than the average human might be. But I suspect that quite a lot of readers will be surprised to find themselves going: “Jeez. If I have to pick a side…I kind of hope the spiders win!” Watching the spider civilization grow is a delight. Tchaikovsky very plausibly outlines how it might develop in ways similar to and different from human society. For instance, as you might expect, they excel at any fiber and chemical-based technologies but are less comfortable with fire and metals. Unlike primates, which usually form social groups with a hierarchy, the spiders start out solitary and become more social over time, but still have a somewhat anarchist approach to life; constant negotiation and consensus-building is the rule, not the exception. Females are, at least initially, the dominant sex. The spiders domesticate several other species of arthropods, including aphids and ants, and almost have a religious war - although that is sort of Kern’s fault! The humans, by contrast, are a mess. As soon as Kern gives them the “my planet, move along” message, things start to fall apart. There are mutinies, commanders encouraging people to treat them as gods, and a definite desire not to consider that the creepy crawlies on the only green, inviting world they can find might be sentient!
The difficulty with this kind of centuries-spanning story is usually connecting with the characters. That was the problem I had with ‘Foundation’ – it was intellectually interesting, but any characters I started to get attached to in one part would be dead by the next. This book solves that for the humans by having three characters who spend so much time in cold sleep that they are alive the whole time, plus Kern, who basically fuses with her pod computer. They get to experience all the changes alongside us, and even the people you might not like much initially you gradually gain an appreciation for over the 600 pages of the story. There are multiple generations of spiders, but a through-line is provided by always naming the main character Portia and – because the spider genus was named after Shakespeare’s clever heroine – calling the secondary characters Bianca, Viola, or (in the case of males) Fabian. As in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, spiders that share names often share similar characteristics, but it is less confusing because only one is alive at a time. Even when their personalities are distinct, there are often call-backs to the prior stages of the spider epic.
I tagged this as “female protagonist” because female characters play extremely pivotal roles. Besides, of course, the various Portias and Biancas, there is Dr. Kern, and the engineer Lain – probably the most generally competent person aboard the Gilgamesh. But that doesn’t mean male characters are unimportant, or simply trigger-happy macho types - though there are a few humans who lean toward that latter description! One particular Fabian, for instance, is a male-liberation activist: his first aim is to make killing males (even during mating) as much a crime as killing females. He leverages his skill as a brilliant chemist during a time of crisis in order to show his worth and get those concessions. And while the “classicist”, Holsten, isn’t initially very well respected by all the engineers and military types who make up of most of the Gilgamesh’s “key crew”, his translation skills turn out to be absolutely essential in making sense of what Kern, and later the spiders, are trying to tell them. He plays off Lain quite well, illustrating the importance of both “science-style reason” and “humanities-style reason”.
If I had one main complaint to make about this book, it would be about the nanovirus. Here’s how it is first described: “Infected individuals would produce offspring mutated in a number of useful ways: greater brain size and complexity, greater body size to accommodate it, more flexible behavioural paths, swifter learning…The virus would even recognize the presence of infection in other individuals of the same species, so as to promote selective breeding.” Problem #1:I don’t think you could, in advance, program anything to selectively mutate a genome in all those ways, much less program it to keep up with the changes in the host and keep them going in those directions. Problem #2: If you could, it would take more than a couple of genes. A virus normally only carries the bare-bones number of genes needed to encode its own capsule and a couple of proteins used in hijacking the host cell for its own replication. A big virus genome is slower to copy/reproduce, making it more likely that the host could evolve immunity to it. Problem #3: Even if one could get around the other problems, there is no selective advantage to the virus in making its hosts smarter. Therefore, random mutations would likely start degrading that ability after a few generations. Problem #4: We learn later that the virus somehow copies things learned during an individual’s lifetime into its genome. That’s just not how heredity works! Occasionally epigenetic changes – methyl groups that affect gene transcription, say – that are triggered by an organism’s environment can be passed down for a couple of generations. We know of no way that those can be incorporated into the actual DNA, unless there were some rule that a gene that had been methylated for several generations would be permanently silenced by a nonsense mutation…and even that wouldn’t pass down detailed knowledge like “how to build a DNA sequencer”! Still, we needed something to kick off the spider civilization – I guess I would just have preferred if it was a bit more hand-waved, so that I didn’t find myself focusing too much on the flaws in this central concept.
When it comes down to the final conflict of the book, I was on the edge of my seat. I didn’t want either group to be obliterated, but I was most scared for the spiders! Ah, but I should have had more faith in the author and his clever little arachnids – they come up with an excellent solution. It was extremely satisfying, because all the pieces of that solution had already been laid out, but even though I actually joked about something similar out-loud halfway through the book I hadn’t considered putting it into action in that way. To say more would be to spoil the reveal, though – so I won’t!
Overall recommendation: If you, like me, enjoy biologically- or anthropologically-inspired science fiction...go read this immediately! It is the freshest, most interesting book I've seen published in that sub-genre in quite a while.
