Children of Time
{5/5} “It should have seemed just days before, according to his personal waking history but, as he had noticed last time, there was clearly something imperfect about suspension. Certainly, Holstein could not feel the centuries that had passed since they abandoned Earth, but something in his mind acknowledged that lost time: the sense of a yawning, terrible wasteland, a purgatory of the imagination.”
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published in 2015
Humanity is expanding into space, including Kern’s World — at least that’s what Avrana Kern calls it. But a shocking betrayal ends all of humanity’s expansion. Kern intended to uplift monkeys on her world but an accident meant that spiders were uplifted instead. Hundreds of years later a new generation is looking for a new home, because Earth is poisoned. When they come across Kern’s World, they’re in for more than one surprise.
It’s about intelligence, colonization, rebellion, and the rise and fall of civilizations. Its big ideas and scientific speculation are reminiscent of a Stephen Baxter novel.
I loved it from start to finish.
This is the first book of Tchaikovsky’s I’ve read. His 10-volume fantasy series is a bit daunting but I’ll be on the lookout for his other books.