Why does Children of Time present itself as a space-opera, I am not sure. As such, it is a disappointment to the space-opera reader. Spaceship fights and planet explorations are reduced to the stringent portion. Hardly do we get to glance at some uninhabitable planet covered in grey fungus. Of the spiders’ planet where most of the action is located, we discover close to nothing: it has trees, it has forests, it has oceans, it has coasts. In other words, it has been terraformed.
The novel starts with cliché situations: the egocentric leader betrayed by her trusted hand-man; a lone human stranded on a spaceship (for a powerful and chilling rendition of this, see Céline Minard’s Le Dernier Monde); environment disaster on Earth sending the last survivors in quest for a new land; the Ghost Ship; the story of Earth first sapient species and of its last (two stories told many times and never better than in Baxter’s Evolution). So much so that, past the fiftieth page, the science-fiction reader wonders whether they will ever start combining into a whole consistent and compelling story.
The answer is: not for a while. The first two parts, 120 pages long, describe backgrounds and opening set-ups, expose force lines and tension patterns. Each exposition scene is but another snap adding up to the previous ones. The dynamic is slow. It is hard to get into – but then, one thinks, isn’t it always the case with space operas?
Halfway through it, at last, the pace picks up. Which is good but does not fix all the issues.
The spiders, these “Children of Time”, have evolved by accident and become an unexpected sapient species. An uplifting programme (unambiguous references are made to David Brin’s cycle), aimed at spreading human consciousness beyond the borders of Earth, has terraformed an unknown number of planets and sent out a ship to colonize them. The ship crew is human – the colons, however, are not. They are apes. The ship’s mission is to land them on a terraformed world, monitor the uplifting programme from orbit – manipulating the apes’ genes to speed conscience development and recording their progress – and ultimately make contact. But as it approaches the planet, everything goes pear-shaped. Mutiny bursts out. The whole human crew dies except for its captain, a ferociously ambitious woman. The apes do not survive the rough landing. The spiders, clandestine passengers of all ships, take their place.
Describing the evolution of an intelligent species, Tchaikovsky goes far to distance himself from a human viewpoint. He settles inside his spiders alien minds, deals with the specifics of an arachnid’s body, how it models, for instance, speech. He projects the social behaviour of our earthen spiders to the scale of a sapient society: females controlling all, males cultivated in harems for pleasure and reproduction. He succeeds in a large part. He gives us glimpses of silent conversations where body language is, literally, everything. However, the problems faced by his characters often feel very human – I dare even say: very Western. Rarely does he attempt to delve into his spiders minds to find their psyche, their sensitivity, the way William Golding or Pierre Pelot managed with pre-historic homo sapiens. Perhaps because Tchaikovsky’s creatures are already a dominant species? Perhaps because they are Children of Men more than Children of Time? This is, after all, the essence of the spiders. Their manipulated genetics conditions them to behave like humans.
As acceptable as it is, the above explanation does not make Tchaikovsky’s choice of perspective the right one. It makes it, at best, a rationalized flaw. True, the lack of otherness is consistent with the story. But the science-fiction reader is no logician or mathematician. He needs his exploration dose and is, once again, denied it. The journey into Otherness territory is all too brief. The novel quickly falls back onto political plot.
As we go into the novel, this seems a recurring pattern. Children of Time is not a bad work, far from it. It is a child of our times. Its rulers, spiders or humans, are soldiers and priests. After the old human Empire has collapsed, terminally polluting Earth, a full spaceship of survivors, the Gilgamesh, has launched, seeking salvation in reaching one of the terraformed world at the end of a two-thousand-year journey. Inevitably they are drawn to the spiders world, try to land on it, are defeated by the Messenger (1). The Gilgamesh inner government collapses and falls into the army’s hands. In Children of Time, all leaders and rulers are irrational and tyrannical. Their opponents, scientists and engineers, struggle to make their voices heard. I cannot imagine a better paradigm for our decade: the megalomaniac, authoritarian ruler squashing the voice of science and reason, powerless to influence the common destiny.
Beyond our era, the novel exposes the vulnerabilities of our ways. The human race, embodied by the Messenger (technologically omnipotent, blinded by her convictions, her pride verging on madness), has fallen victim of its hubris and destroyed Earth. But that same hubris, that same excessiveness which kills us also saves our genes. As mad as it is, and with results so far remote from its original goals, the uplifting programme has nevertheless succeeded. Nothing great can be achieved without excess, Tchaikovsky says, and nothing gets achieved the way it was planned – another set of clichés perhaps, but these ones are pictured in rather convincing fashion.
Here we are given to observe a new experiment in consciousness. Tchaikovsky wants his spiders different from men. Humans have doppelgängers. They emerge at the end, in the conflict between the Messenger and the military staff of the Gilgamesh. Humans do not understand cooperation. We understand war and destruction. Spiders, even genetically manipulated, expand without destroying. They invent clean technology. They are peaceful. Such, at least, is the tale of Children of Time. Strangely, Tchaikovsky forgets that his spiders are not the nice creatures he wants them to be. They have submitted all ants colonies to slavery. As a species, their entire success relies on the merciless exploitation of their fellow ants, whom they consider a sub-species and destroy without second thought, in total disregard for their sapient nature (ants too have benefited from the uplifting, albeit in a way quite different from the spiders) (2).
Ultimately, here is the novel main flaw: caricature. Spiders personalities are, for the best part, one or two-dimensional. They have no personal history, very little psychology. By giving them recurrent names (Porta, Bianca, Viola, the final “a” reminiscent of the three Parcae) Tchaikovsky gives them the genre treatment: characters have a role but no depth. Compare them to the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude where Garcia Marques also uses recurrent names. In the Columbian tale, the successive Aurelianos and Jose Arcadios are bound by actions and decisions, passed through time by memories. They mutate into myth, they shape their inheritors. In Children of Time, despite the spiders extraordinary ability to willingly transmit selected knowledge through their genes, the successive spiders show no side effect, none of the scars that come with family history. This is not because their ability is so perfected, so well designed, that only the positive, non-emotional knowledge can be passed on. It is because the novel characters have no personality of their own. Only the ultimate generation of spiders, and among it its sole male representative Fabian, shows some flesh.
Reaching the end of this review, I realize with sadness how negative it sounds. It is a shame that I did not manage to paint the novel under the good light it deserves. With all its flaws, Children of time is surprisingly pleasant to read. We side with the spiders, we are conflicted between our gut empathy for the last human specimen and this new sapient species which seem to avoid all the traps where we have fallen. We pity the fate of the children born aboard the Gilgamesh, whose sole purpose is that of a genetic link keeping our race alive in the great interstellar journey. This tragedy, and the weird remote love story between a classicist erudite and a rude engineer, are the only emotional anchors of the Gilgamesh otherwise cold odyssey. But they, at least, fulfill the science-fiction reader, this sucker for tragedy.
This is not the novel’s sole grip. I will leave the flatness of the writing, its complete absence of beauty, for another review (it is not enough for a style to be efficient, the tale is not the only component of a fictional work, and plain English does not suit all purposes). Tchaikovsky’s work is nevertheless, and beyond doubt, well-crafted. The pace of the story is controlled. The experience of the spiders uplifting is, at times, captivating, the suspense is built in a masterly fashion, holding the tension up until the point where the final pages drop its full weight on the most tenuous thread: will humans survive, or will they sink in the universe bottomless well? Exploring the ends of times is another of science-fiction’s great topics, one which has received many treatments. Tchaikovsky’s realistic approach, though grim, can offer some optimism if looked at in a certain angle. However (for, I am afraid, I must finish on a negative) it never reaches the marmoreal splendours of Hogston’s House on the Borderland or the poignancy of Baxter’s final scenes in Evolution.
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The novel starts with cliché situations: the egocentric leader betrayed by her trusted hand-man; a lone human stranded on a spaceship (for a powerful and chilling rendition of this, see Céline Minard’s Le Dernier Monde); environment disaster on Earth sending the last survivors in quest for a new land; the Ghost Ship; the story of Earth first sapient species and of its last (two stories told many times and never better than in Baxter’s Evolution). So much so that, past the fiftieth page, the science-fiction reader wonders whether they will ever start combining into a whole consistent and compelling story.
The answer is: not for a while. The first two parts, 120 pages long, describe backgrounds and opening set-ups, expose force lines and tension patterns. Each exposition scene is but another snap adding up to the previous ones. The dynamic is slow. It is hard to get into – but then, one thinks, isn’t it always the case with space operas?
Halfway through it, at last, the pace picks up. Which is good but does not fix all the issues.
The spiders, these “Children of Time”, have evolved by accident and become an unexpected sapient species. An uplifting programme (unambiguous references are made to David Brin’s cycle), aimed at spreading human consciousness beyond the borders of Earth, has terraformed an unknown number of planets and sent out a ship to colonize them. The ship crew is human – the colons, however, are not. They are apes. The ship’s mission is to land them on a terraformed world, monitor the uplifting programme from orbit – manipulating the apes’ genes to speed conscience development and recording their progress – and ultimately make contact. But as it approaches the planet, everything goes pear-shaped. Mutiny bursts out. The whole human crew dies except for its captain, a ferociously ambitious woman. The apes do not survive the rough landing. The spiders, clandestine passengers of all ships, take their place.
Describing the evolution of an intelligent species, Tchaikovsky goes far to distance himself from a human viewpoint. He settles inside his spiders alien minds, deals with the specifics of an arachnid’s body, how it models, for instance, speech. He projects the social behaviour of our earthen spiders to the scale of a sapient society: females controlling all, males cultivated in harems for pleasure and reproduction. He succeeds in a large part. He gives us glimpses of silent conversations where body language is, literally, everything. However, the problems faced by his characters often feel very human – I dare even say: very Western. Rarely does he attempt to delve into his spiders minds to find their psyche, their sensitivity, the way William Golding or Pierre Pelot managed with pre-historic homo sapiens. Perhaps because Tchaikovsky’s creatures are already a dominant species? Perhaps because they are Children of Men more than Children of Time? This is, after all, the essence of the spiders. Their manipulated genetics conditions them to behave like humans.
As acceptable as it is, the above explanation does not make Tchaikovsky’s choice of perspective the right one. It makes it, at best, a rationalized flaw. True, the lack of otherness is consistent with the story. But the science-fiction reader is no logician or mathematician. He needs his exploration dose and is, once again, denied it. The journey into Otherness territory is all too brief. The novel quickly falls back onto political plot.
As we go into the novel, this seems a recurring pattern. Children of Time is not a bad work, far from it. It is a child of our times. Its rulers, spiders or humans, are soldiers and priests. After the old human Empire has collapsed, terminally polluting Earth, a full spaceship of survivors, the Gilgamesh, has launched, seeking salvation in reaching one of the terraformed world at the end of a two-thousand-year journey. Inevitably they are drawn to the spiders world, try to land on it, are defeated by the Messenger (1). The Gilgamesh inner government collapses and falls into the army’s hands. In Children of Time, all leaders and rulers are irrational and tyrannical. Their opponents, scientists and engineers, struggle to make their voices heard. I cannot imagine a better paradigm for our decade: the megalomaniac, authoritarian ruler squashing the voice of science and reason, powerless to influence the common destiny.
Beyond our era, the novel exposes the vulnerabilities of our ways. The human race, embodied by the Messenger (technologically omnipotent, blinded by her convictions, her pride verging on madness), has fallen victim of its hubris and destroyed Earth. But that same hubris, that same excessiveness which kills us also saves our genes. As mad as it is, and with results so far remote from its original goals, the uplifting programme has nevertheless succeeded. Nothing great can be achieved without excess, Tchaikovsky says, and nothing gets achieved the way it was planned – another set of clichés perhaps, but these ones are pictured in rather convincing fashion.
Here we are given to observe a new experiment in consciousness. Tchaikovsky wants his spiders different from men. Humans have doppelgängers. They emerge at the end, in the conflict between the Messenger and the military staff of the Gilgamesh. Humans do not understand cooperation. We understand war and destruction. Spiders, even genetically manipulated, expand without destroying. They invent clean technology. They are peaceful. Such, at least, is the tale of Children of Time. Strangely, Tchaikovsky forgets that his spiders are not the nice creatures he wants them to be. They have submitted all ants colonies to slavery. As a species, their entire success relies on the merciless exploitation of their fellow ants, whom they consider a sub-species and destroy without second thought, in total disregard for their sapient nature (ants too have benefited from the uplifting, albeit in a way quite different from the spiders) (2).
Ultimately, here is the novel main flaw: caricature. Spiders personalities are, for the best part, one or two-dimensional. They have no personal history, very little psychology. By giving them recurrent names (Porta, Bianca, Viola, the final “a” reminiscent of the three Parcae) Tchaikovsky gives them the genre treatment: characters have a role but no depth. Compare them to the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude where Garcia Marques also uses recurrent names. In the Columbian tale, the successive Aurelianos and Jose Arcadios are bound by actions and decisions, passed through time by memories. They mutate into myth, they shape their inheritors. In Children of Time, despite the spiders extraordinary ability to willingly transmit selected knowledge through their genes, the successive spiders show no side effect, none of the scars that come with family history. This is not because their ability is so perfected, so well designed, that only the positive, non-emotional knowledge can be passed on. It is because the novel characters have no personality of their own. Only the ultimate generation of spiders, and among it its sole male representative Fabian, shows some flesh.
Reaching the end of this review, I realize with sadness how negative it sounds. It is a shame that I did not manage to paint the novel under the good light it deserves. With all its flaws, Children of time is surprisingly pleasant to read. We side with the spiders, we are conflicted between our gut empathy for the last human specimen and this new sapient species which seem to avoid all the traps where we have fallen. We pity the fate of the children born aboard the Gilgamesh, whose sole purpose is that of a genetic link keeping our race alive in the great interstellar journey. This tragedy, and the weird remote love story between a classicist erudite and a rude engineer, are the only emotional anchors of the Gilgamesh otherwise cold odyssey. But they, at least, fulfill the science-fiction reader, this sucker for tragedy.
This is not the novel’s sole grip. I will leave the flatness of the writing, its complete absence of beauty, for another review (it is not enough for a style to be efficient, the tale is not the only component of a fictional work, and plain English does not suit all purposes). Tchaikovsky’s work is nevertheless, and beyond doubt, well-crafted. The pace of the story is controlled. The experience of the spiders uplifting is, at times, captivating, the suspense is built in a masterly fashion, holding the tension up until the point where the final pages drop its full weight on the most tenuous thread: will humans survive, or will they sink in the universe bottomless well? Exploring the ends of times is another of science-fiction’s great topics, one which has received many treatments. Tchaikovsky’s realistic approach, though grim, can offer some optimism if looked at in a certain angle. However (for, I am afraid, I must finish on a negative) it never reaches the marmoreal splendours of Hogston’s House on the Borderland or the poignancy of Baxter’s final scenes in Evolution.
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[1] She is
the surviving captain of the uplifting ship. She is also the novel best
character, intelligent and powerful in excess, and mad. Also worth noting: all
but one of Tchaikovsky’s dominant characters are female, and they are all
equally un-feminine: rude, violent, blunt – as if the author had made every
effort to erase the clichés of science-fiction female characters and in the
process failed to reach down to their sensibility.
[1] When reading about the Spiders vs Ants
conflict, one cannot help thinking of East-West conflicts in Western popular
culture. The vulnerable but adaptable, cunning, risk-taking spiders versus the
overwhelming but robotic ants. In it, the indulgent reader will see nothing but
one of Western science-fiction numerous topoi. The slightly exasperated one
will see another illustration of Tchaikovsky’s tendencies to anthropomorphize
his uplifted animals.