Children of Time (novel)
Children of Time is a 2015 science fiction novel by author Adrian Tchaikovsky. The novel has two plot strands, one of which follows the evolution of a civilization of genetically modified Portia labiata on a terraformed exoplanet, guided by an artificial intelligence based on the personality of one of the human terraformers of the planet. The second plot strand follows the journey of an interstellar ark ship containing cryonically-preserved humans as they seek a new planetary home following a planetwide environmental collapse on Earth.
The novel received positive reviews, and won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel. The director of the award program praised the novel as having "universal scale and sense of wonder reminiscent of Clarke himself."
The next in the series, Children of Ruin, was published in 2019. A third book, Children of Memory, was published in 2022. A fourth book, Children of Strife, is set to be published in March 2026. In 2023, the series was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Series.
Plot
In the far future, Dr. Avrana Kern is the head of a science team orbiting a terraformed, previously uninhabitable exoplanet that she hopes will be named "Kern's World." The team is preparing to release a genetically designed nanovirus onto the new world to accelerate the evolution of a group of monkeys. There is talk of war stirring back home between authorities and multiple anti-technology factions opposed to this kind of genetic engineering, including a terrorist group or radical movement known as "non ultra natura".Dr. Kern learns there is an agent of an anti-technology group aboard the ship about to overload the reactor, and she flees aboard an escape pod before anyone else can. The payload of monkeys is jettisoned from the ship in a landing craft, yet it burns up in atmospheric entry. With no monkeys on Kern's World, and its ecosystems originally seeded with a minimum of possible competitor species for Kern's experiment, the nanovirus spends its time infecting and altering a multitude of living creatures, a notable example being jumping spiders —referred to in the book as Portiids. Dr. Kern is left stranded in orbit awaiting rescue, periodically waking from stasis, and she is troubled by the sudden cessation of radio signals bleeding out from humanity's home.
Many millennia pass, and civilization reemerges on Earth from the hunter-gathering descendants of survivors, eventually salvaging machinery left over from Kern's time that is known only as 'the Old Empire'. Faced with the slow collapse of Earth's biosphere due to the long-delayed consequences of the ancient war, the last remnants of humanity are en route to Kern's World aboard the starship Gilgamesh, hoping for a paradisiacal planet and ignorant of the uplifted Portiid spiders. Confronting Dr. Kern, who is powerful and rendered crazed and xenophobic by the millennia in orbit, the Gilgamesh takes a centuries-long detour to a neighboring system that proves uninhabitable. The novel plays off the contrast between the rapid advancement of the spiders' societies and the descent of the crew of last humans into strife and barbarism, primarily seen through the eyes of the Gilgamesh's chief classicist, Holsten Mason.
After the Gilgamesh returns to Kern's World, the two narratives collide, seemingly dooming one or both sides to extinction. The Portiids, on the other hand, devise a strategy that saves both their world and the invaders, uniting with and inviting the last humans to live with them on Kern's World, drawing on past genetic memories, known as "Understandings" that showed that collaboration was the better option in the end.