"Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky
One of my favorite world building books this year has been ''Children of Time'' by Adrian Tchaikovsky. In it, humanity goes out into the stars and begins terraforming planets for future colonization, because sooner or later humanity will have to leave the ruins of Earth That Was behind and go live somewhere else.
A lot of the story revolves around this delightful little planet where primates are targeted with a fancy virus. The goal is to produce a subservient race to serve the needs of future generations of human colonists. While the planet is terraformed to produce a highly rich and fertile environment for habitation the virus will aggressively change the local primates into what humanity needs.
What Adrian does is take a regular idea and twist it into something interesting. The apes don’t actually fare too well, so the virus picks something else entirely. In this case spiders and ants (and a subsurface species not really relevant to most plants f the plot) become a dominant species with multiple civilization threatening crises built into the book. It’s amazing to see an alien civilization grow from nothing into a modern civilization reaching to go to the stars.
The book spends a lot of time of biology, aggressively evolving genomes, and social constructs, which evolve over hundreds thanks to the accelerated time span the virus sets on any species it evolves. The interaction between spiders and humans is exceedingly well written, because the spiders and humans don’t exactly communicate the same way. There’s a lot of biology and engineering, but also religion, philosophy, and culture stacked one layer on top of the other throughout the stand alone novel. The novel effortlessly tell’s the epic of a brand new sapient species while at the same contrasting it against the failing and ultimately doomed human civilization. All of this is explored through a pretty hard sci-fi setting where it’s easy to see how the human created virus in combination with different species and environments creates something completely unexpected, but at the same time logically sound.
It’s only at the very end of book where the spiders get into the information era where there’s a bit of a leap of faith. The storytelling skips a few rungs and just assumes the spiders get into orbit around their planet without talking about how they get there.
This feels different from how painstakingly detailed the book is about the developmental steps of the spiders up until then, but … it’s not a deal-breaker.
So, as far as world building goes, this is the best book I have seen in a long time. The plot is alright, the characters aren’t terribly nuanced, and there’s not a lot of dialogue in the book.
One of the smartest things Adrian does is creates these sorts of amalgams of characters when it comes to the spiders. Because the entire species is evolving incredibly fast, so what Adrian does is re-use the same character names over and over and over again. You get this feeling of characters who evolve through the centuries, but each generation presented in the book is also a distinct personality.
I think sci-fi is one of the best genres out there, especially in terms of world building. It’s such an amazing tool to use as filter for the problems of humanity/the fate of humans/ commentary on humanity in general. There is something compelling about progression,in almost any form. I think maybe that’s what makes this story unique. I enjoyed this book particularly from a characterization perspective and would recommend it to everyone who enjoys reading sci-fi.