Staff Pick: Children of Time

This book is an excellent space opera with a delicious balance of horror, humor, action, philosophy, and, of course, science fiction. The character development is deep, the worldbuilding is vast, and I was shocked at how well Tchaikovsky balanced intimate personal moments against a plot that spans millennia.

Beyond this point, there may be spoilers.

This space opera is the first novel in a trilogy that so effectively conveys the existential dread of environmental apocalypses that it would have been unbearable without Tchaikovsky’s dry wit. The plot begins in the far distant future, where science has advanced to the point of terraforming other worlds. It begins with a conflict that destroys our home world and then leaps forward epochs to follow the small human civilization that has survived. Tchaikovsky trusts his readers to piece together the complex, evolving story from multiple points of view. He does an excellent job creating distinctly alien cultures to counterpoint his explorations of what makes a human being quintessentially human. In many ways, Children of Time is the story of human hubris, of people being their own worst enemies over and over again. It speaks to how serious the unintended consequences of our actions can be, and how beautiful the serendipitous discoveries are.

 It is also the story of a sexist civilization of giant, genius jumping spiders. It tells of a woman who was a megalomaniac before centuries of isolation as an uploaded copy of her own mind drove her deeply mad. It is the story of a historian who lives out the worst week of his life over the span of centuries because he is only awoken from cryo-sleep in moments of emergency. It is a story that should have been a chaotic mess but ended up complex, beautiful, and shockingly fun to read despite the depth of the subjects covered.