mp3 cd
Published Aug. 4, 2017 by Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio, Audible Studios on Brilliance.
This book is more Star Trek than Star Trek. It embodies the ideals of infinite diversity in infinite combinations in a way that struck me to my heart. It stretches our minds to consider the most alien and for many people the most feared animals as having the capacity to be people, with just a little help. In all of his work, Adrian Tchaikovsky is a bull in the china shop of our delicate distinctions and artificial barriers between "thing" and "not thing".
This was a great book and I see why it has won awards and is generally regarded in a positive light. While the characters are basic, they are nonetheless interesting and the plot is straightforward enough to keep the focus on the setting. The setting is excellent and the way the two societies, one human, one spider, is explored is clever. I enjoyed both viewpoints and wish we had gotten more time after they merged together, but maybe that is a story for the second novel? I look forward to reading the other novels in this series and finding out.
For a full review, check out my blog: strakul.blogspot.com/2024/06/book-review-children-of-time-by-adrian.html
Content warning Discussion of the ending
For most of this book I didn't expect to continue with the rest of the series. I very much enjoyed the spider scenes and seeing their culture, values, and technology evolve over time, but I didn't much care for any of the human scenes until right at the end.
One aspect that I particularly liked is that, ironically, the spiders are effectively Humanist at the end while the humans take on the place of the un-evolved animals who think of the spiders in a predator/prey relationship. The spiders then turn the tables and uplift the humans in the same way (and using the same mechanism) that the humans originally uplifted their civilization (except by bootstrapping empathy instead of sentience). It brought the whole thing to a nice conclusion in a circular way and made me decide to try the second book as well.
Una storia di scienza e tecnologia da una prospettiva completamente inaspettata. Un ragionamento molto interessante sul linguaggio e sulla terraformazione.
