Children of Time, reviewed

By @SimonCocking, review of Children of Time, available from Amazon here.

Adrian Tchaikovksy’s award-winning novel Children of Time, is the epic story of humanity’s battle for survival on a terraformed planet.

Who will inherit this new Earth?

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age – a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind’s worst nightmare.

Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth

This is a fun, imaginative, speculative look at how things could pan out for the human race. As you might imagine our self limiting tendancies towards conflict and an inability to work together do manage to get in our own way, repeatedly. Terraforming certainly seems like a potential solution for the woes of the climate change damage inflicted onto our own earth. But does that necessarily give us the right to change someone else’s planet?

Throughout the book Tchaikovksy wrestles with lots of currently relevant issues that we face on earth, diversity, discrimination, species domination by other species, the characters may be different but the issues are real and relevant. Like the best sci-fi Tchaikovksy aims to both tell an interesting story and also weave into this provocative questions about how we live our own lives too, as well as thoughtful predictions around how we might come to live in the future too.

We enjoyed reading it, and it was also quickly appropriated by the teenagers in the house too, who all took it and read it fast before returning it to us to allow us to finish reading it and complete the review. This book now forms the first in a series, of which the next one, Children of Ruin is coming out in May.

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