Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s hefty trilogy, totaling well over 1,500 pages, begins with Children of Time (2015), continues in Children of Ruin (2019), and concludes in Children of Memory (2023).
It’s brilliant.
And it ain’t for everyone.
There is a tradition in science fiction of work that is carried by the sheer overwhelming ingenuity of a core idea or set of concepts more than traditional writerly components. If you are looking for compelling and memorable characters, if you are looking for skillfully plotted arcs that leave you gasping at each twist and turn, if you are looking for a thickly rendered world that fully immerses you in deep cultural settings … these aren’t the books for you.
But it is a masterful, imaginative, and–for me–absolutely fascinating execution of a spiral of ideas around a core thread: how would evolution manifest with different species?
Children of Time starts with one of those what-could-possibly-go-wrong plans: the Earth is becoming uninhabitable, and one solution being pursued by your typical global congregation of corporations and scientists is to drop a virus that replicates human evolution at hyperspeed on a planet that already has some proto-mammalian life. Let that run for a while, then the original humans can show up in their hastily constructed deep space transport vessels, and bingo, we haz new Earth. Like I said, what could possibly go wrong?
It’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s not as planned: the virus, instead of making it to the proto-apes, finds its way into the arachnids. So what develops on this planet is highly evolved, critical thinking, socially aware, fully civilized … spiders. And what Tchaikovsky does spectacularly is work through what that might look like, how an arachnid race might evolve, what the implications might be of eight incredibly sensitive legs and countless eyes and a very flexible sense of verticality and a hypersensitivity to smell and vibration and and and …
And all of that just works. It’s imaginative, detailed, fascinating, and based on just enough biology to be convincing as a potential path of possibilities. Most critically, the arachnids develop into themselves, they don’t become spider-humans, they become evolved spiders, adapted to their unique environments and physiology.
The plot does just enough to keep the reader moving to the next revelation about the spiders, and wanting more, even after its somewhat too-pat conclusion.
Which takes us to the second book.
Set well after the opening novel, Children of Ruin focuses on the same process, but with octopi (a very different plot thread, focusing on terraforming a planet for human habitation, but it’s all a vehicle for the accelerated evolution). Again, throughout the novel, the plot machinations are a bit rough around the edges, and the characters tend to be less distinguishable than perhaps a reader would like. But the cephalods! The imaginative power behind the invention of their emotional lives, their curiosity, the way their brain and limbs interact, their ability to problem solve … it’s stunning.
You’ll never see an octopus in an aquarium reaching outwards with an arm again without thinking of Tchaikovsky’s conception of what could be going on beneath their color-changing skin.
Children of Memory is set even further in the future, and is a little different in that the plot is more clearly and compellingly articulated, revolving around the politics of an emerging world. And, the evolutionary biology is less detailed, although the conception of highly evolved paired corvids is brilliant, wrestling with the core question of whether solving a puzzle represents intelligence or the fruits of highly focused repetition and whether the difference between those two carries any real value.
There is an interesting question for writers buried in there as well: as Tchaikovsky improves on the traditional dimensions of what makes a “good author,” does he lose the space to display his truly unique imaginative gifts?
I think at this point it should be pretty clear if the trilogy will appeal to you. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the creativity continues to live in my mind.