Children of Time
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Having read it
★★★★★
Like all really good sci-fi, it creatively asked questions (on top of and within its ideas and plot structure) of its readers and their society’s contemporary issues. Brilliantly suggestive of forcing and aiding you to think a bit deeper as you read quite a compelling and fast moving (despite the timespan involved) tale about various evolutionary and societal themes and ideas. Although, maybe I just think too much about thinking! A fantastic ending as well – evolutionary progress is both complex and quite simple – that could easily start another epic tale!
A good passage
The ark ship Gilgamesh had been built to last a very long time indeed, using every piece of craft and science that Holsten’s civilisation had been able to wrest from the cold, vacuum-withered hands of their forebears. Even so, had there been an option, nobody would have trusted it, for how could anyone have faith that a machine – any machine, any work of the hands of humanity – could last throughout the appalling period of time that would be required for this journey?
A second good passage
‘Even if he does manage to upload himself, he’ll need people to fix him.’ Holsten wasn’t sure precisely why he was defending Guyen, unless it was that he had long made a profession out of disagreeing with just about every proposition put in front of him.
A third good passage
Holsten stared at him for a long while, thinking through the implications of that: thinking about Earth’s long history before the fall, before the ice came. His society had possessed a fragmented, imperfect understanding of the predecessors that they were constantly trying to ape, and did even that poor record now boil down to just himself, the contents of one old man’s head? All that history, and if . . . when I die . . . ? He did not see anyone having time to attend history classes in Karst’s survivalist Eden.