Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award with this exciting science fiction classic space opera. All the action takes place on a planet thousands of years from a dying Earth that was destroyed by human's hate for each other. Doctor Avrana Kern attempts to send thousands of monkeys down to a green planet along with a nano-virus to speed up the evolution of the monkeys in hope of producing a better human being. Her ship is one of several ships launched in different directions looking to terraform an unoccupied planet capable of supporting human life. It takes almost 15 years to find a suitable planet. But before she can unload the monkeys, a political group against the project blows up the ship, Doctor Kern escapes in an observation satellite and releases the nano-virus on the planet not knowing that all her monkeys are dead. She maintains an orbit around the planet. Now thousands of years pass and the real story of Children of Time begins. I didn’t issue a spoiler alert because all that I have told you is just a preface of the main story that follows on this 600-page tome. This is the story of the spaceship, Gilgamesh, and it's several thousand years voyage. As vast as this novel is, it’s amazing that the main characters on the spaceship are only six, and the main insects on the planet are held to four. What is interesting is that when Doctor Kern dropped the nano-virus to speed up evolution she was unaware the planet already had an insect population.
Since the spaceship took thousands of years to arrive at the target planet, generations of people were born on the ship. Most of the population was put to sleep in coffin-like containers only to be awakened if they were needed to help maintain the ship or to be sent down to a planet to start human life. Holsten Mason, the man in charge of remembering Earth’s past history, is over 2,000 years old since he was an original crew member on Gilgamesh and has been put to sleep and awakened so many times that he technically was that old. The author’s story was initially confusing until I realized he was talking about two different spaceships in two different eras. That’s why Mason was important to Gilgamesh, he could tell the current humans about the past (the old world and their technology) when things would pop up that affected a present-day situation. His knowledge was part of a dying skill. What I loved about these spaceships was that the author didn’t get technical, he does not explain how the engines run or how the sleeping coffins work. If some new technical feature on the spaceship comes up…so be it. I don’t care how it works, just get on with the story. On the other hand, he is great at describing the creatures that already live on the terraformed planet. My kind of sci/fi storytelling, good character descriptions, and less technical talk. An example of what I dislike in sci/fi literature is a novel written by author Vernor Vinge (a computer science professor and writer), who drove me crazy with his constant boring technical talk in his sci/fi novel, Rainbows End.
If I told you about the insects that were evolving on the terraformed planet it would spoil the story for you. I will just tell you that Kern’s observation satellite continued to orbit the terraformed planet for 2,000 years holding off any ship that tried to land on the planet. When Gilgamesh first tried to land on the terraformed planet, they were warned by Kern’s satellite to stay away. “It’s a warning, it saying that we’re transmitting from incorrect coordinates or something like that, It says we’re forbidden here,” I think that Author Tchaikovsky’s story was unique and written in a manner that every reader can understand. There are 600 pages of eccentric enjoyment ahead of you. I highly recommend this novel to any genre of the reader.
RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
