Review: "Children of Time" (2015) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

For a long, long time my favorite book was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. This was in part because it's objectively a hugely influential novel, and also because I made the decision at a very young age. When you're 14 and you want to sound smart in front of your friends, you pick the most "academic" book you've read and double down on it. That's just how it goes.

Luckily reading, unlike the rest of my adolescence, wasn't just a phase. Until my mid-20s I would devour pages and pages in a single sitting, enjoying my time but having convinced myself that, no matter how good a book was, it would never be my favorite book because that slot was already spoken for and, as we all know, favorites are permanent.

It was last year when my mother, of all people, told me about Children of Time. She was in the midst of listening to it on audiobook and wasn't having a great time, which was unsurprising given that she's not big into highbrow scifi. If I recall correctly she made a point to note that the book wasn't bad, it just wasn't for her. To this day I don't believe she's finished it.

The premise seemed traditional enough: Humanity has been forced off of Earth due to climate change and unending war, spurred on by ideological terrorists. They've dumped all their money into a fleet of colony ships that will be setting course for various worlds determined to be likely inhabitable. From there things start to get weird.

Near one such planet light years away, an ongoing experiment goes terribly wrong when one of those  ideological terrorists reveals themselves and literally blows up a research vessel, inadvertently trapping its lead researcher in a life pod run by an Artificial Intelligence of her own design. Hoping the exploded ship's payload (literally a giant barrel of monkeys and a large amount of experimental evolution-juice) made it planet-side safely, she puts herself into habitation and waits for her future creations to contact her.

Going into it I had reservations. I had no doubt it would be a fun read but I was suspicious that it would be too convoluted or rely too heavily on tropes to further the story (something you run into a lot in scifi and fantasy). That being said, clocking in at a hefty 609 pages it was certainly the type of book you could use to kill a man, which for me is a check in the "pro" column believe it or not, so I dove in.

Let me explain this as plainly as I can with as little hyperbole as possible: I read this book in less than a week. It was such a beautifully worded, perfectly plotted, intellectually stimulating piece I would literally wake up mad that I had obligations that weren't reading Children of Time. I have never, and likely will never again, read a book as clever or creative as this one. As an author, if this manuscript was given to me and I was told, "This is the only copy in existence", I would have had no choice but to eat it out of jealousy.

Something that really grabbed me early on was how much I was connecting and identifying with one of the main characters, Portia. Her name refers not to one specific character, but an entire lineage spanning hundreds and hundreds of years that we follow throughout the book. All of her iterations that we see are both distinctively individual and grounded in a degree of familiarity.

It's difficult, sometimes, for authors to write dialogue and motivations for the opposite gender. To me is frequently comes out stilted or disingenuous. For example, as much as I love the Harry Potter series to death, the male characters in that book (particularly later in the series) feel off. Their behaviors, their motivations, the way they converse, everything falls into this literary uncanny valley where it looks perfectly normal, but it doesn't feel normal. This isn't unique to J.K. Rowling's writing, but I won't bog this post down with further details.

The reason I bring this up is because I never once had that sensation with Portia. Maybe this phenomenon speaks to a deeper, unrealized part of me and how I process gender differences, but I have never related as closely to something that was both decidedly inhuman and of the opposite gender. She's an incredible character to read and, if you read Children of Time for no other reason, let it be so you can experience Portia.

Stangely enough, the primary male human character felt the most alien. This isn't to say he was poorly written or that I wish something was changed about his arc, far from it, only that it was strange to feel so disconnected from a character archetype that matched my own. Maybe this means secretly, deep in the darkest recesses of my mind, I identify as a female spider. Who knows. Given the themes of the book, however, I'm almost positive this type of dissonance was intended by Tchaikovsky.

The cast of supporting characters is equally well-formed and not a single one gets lost in the crowd. This should come as no surprised given Tchaikovsky's bibliography if you're familiar with it, but as someone who had never read his previous works, reading a scifi book with well-realized characters that jumped off the page was a breath of fresh air. You'd think genre fiction would be rife with memorable characters, and it is, but it's more rife with tired stereotypes and cliches.

This is all of course to say nothing of the magnificent set pieces. Adrian doesn't shy away from the grandiose here, specifically in the third act, and it pays off in spades. The level of wonder at work in these pages is unlike anything I've seen in my objectively short time alive, and it's made even more impressive when you realize that, ultimately, the book only has 3 main "sets": The planet, the colony ship, and the researcher's life pod.

That researcher (Dr. Kern) and her pod-AI serve together as a vessel for an intriguing look at a central theme of the book: What does it mean to be alive? If you read sci-fi or fantasy you've no doubt read many an author's take on what it means to be human, but that question is already answered here by the machinations of the colony ship crew and the countless problems they have to face, at one point going so far as to form an entirely new, ship-based society governed solely by the law of one man who is decidedly crazy.

To say the ending of Children of Time is optimistic is to do a disservice to the work. To my knowledge at the time of publication there was nothing in the public eye that had tried to do what Tchaikovsky does here for at least a decade. Though I'm hesitant to call him a trail blazer in that respect, I have no qualms saying that he reinvigorated the otherwise dead genre of hopeful scifi.

All in all, I give Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky 5 Jakes out of 5 Possible Jakes. The lanugage is musical, the characters genuine, and the locales vivid. It's everything I could ask for in a novel and I think it will be for you as well.