Portia is not tuned to God’s frequency, but the tumultuous response from the ground tells her what has happened. ... translations come through swiftly, passing across the face of the planet as swift as thought. God has apologized. [p. 478]
Twenty light-years from Earth, Dr Avrana Kern is about to witness the triumph of her career: the release of an uplift nanovirus, and a barrel-full of monkeys, on the terraformed planet she thinks of as 'Kern's World'. But there's a saboteur on board the Brin (nice genre-savvy nod there) and her best-laid plans are thwarted. Confined to an orbiting satellite, she uploads her personality to meld with the vessel's AI. And on the planet she orbits, the virus is doing its work -- though, in the absence of primate life-forms to be uplifted into 'sentient aides and servants', not quite as she'd hoped.
Children of Time chronicles the rapid ascent to intelligence, civilsation and scientific endeavour by the planet's arachnid inhabitants. Their lifespans are short -- we don't get to know any individual very well -- but through three main lines of descent (Portia, Bianca and Fabian) Tchaikovsky sketches the evolution of a female-led, interconnected network of nests, of inherited knowledge, of ant-domestication and a very different aesthetic to what Avrana Kern, or what she's become, had expected.
When the sleeper ship Gilgamesh, fleeing the ruins of Earth and desperate to find a viable colony, reenters the system, only the 'classicist' Holsten Mason, unique in his ability to understand ancient languages, can communicate with the entity in the satellite. And that entity, now known as the Messenger to those who watch the skies, is coming to terms with the fact that her creation is 'further away from her than she would have anticipated from fellow primates'. Xenophobia, arachnophobia, human expansionist and colonial tendencies, and a society with a distinctly alien mindset... the outlook is not good.
I can't say I actually liked any of the characters, except perhaps Holsten. Some of them are monsters; some of them are spiders. But the evolution of spider-society was fascinating: the metamorphosis of truth into myth, the strategies of 'a species that thinks naturally in terms of interconnected networks and systems', the arguments for the rights of males ... And, beside all that, the pitiful remnants of the human race, scrabbling in the ruins of their ancestors, trying to find a home. I'm glad I finally got around to reading this novel, winner of the Clarke Award back in 2016: but I confess I like Tchaikovsky's recent work -- especially The Doors of Eden -- rather better, perhaps because it seems more light-hearted and playful.
Fulfils the ‘Time in the title’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.
No comments:
Post a Comment