# Children of Time

Because I am foolish, I needed to have this book recommended to me a zillion times. My problems with it were many. It looked too long, I prefer one-off stories over the first books of series, and I immediately fell into a deep, dreamless sleep when someone described half the book as an evolutionary tale about spiders.

I finally knuckled down and read it and now I am angry. Angry at myself for waiting this long and angry at Adrian Tchaikovsky for perhaps ruining all other space operas. This is one of the best books I’ve read in ages.

This is a book about so many things that it’s hard to summarize how I feel about it. Instead, here’s just a short, random list of things I appreciate about it:

• Let’s talk about those spiders. I struggle with aliens in sci-fi as I find there’s a tension between relatability and believability. Usually aliens are either too human, being relatable but not at all believable, or too alien, becoming quite believable but without any way for me to care about them. Tchaikovsky neatly avoids both traps. Chapters focusing on the spiders allow us to see the world through their eyes, becoming at once both believable and relatable.

• I loved how this book plays with time. Without going into details, this book goes beyond “relativistic time is wacky” and deals with some very interesting ramifications of the extreme time lengths of deep space travel. We share the characters’ confusion at times, trying to piece together what has happened and why.

• The pacing is fantastic. I really wasn’t expecting to say that of a near-infinitely long book about evolutionary science fiction, but it was a real page turner that I couldn’t put down.

• While it’s the first in a series, it does a great job of wrapping up with a great, satisfying conclusion. I didn’t feel like I was merely reading a prolonged Act I.

The book has a few minor flaws - I wasn’t invested in the spiders’ story until about a third of the way through the book, and a number of the human characters seemed a little thin. But there’s so much wonder in this book that I can’t be bothered to care.