Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Spiders inherit Earth. Humanity's ark finds evolved civilization. Tchaikovsky's Hugo-winning series: Clarke Award. Four books spanning millennia exploring consciousness, evolution, alien minds.

Children of Time is a 2015 science fiction novel by author Adrian Tchaikovsky. The novel has two plot strands, one of which follows the evolution of a civilization of genetically modified Portia labiata (arachnoid) on a terraformed exoplanet, guided by an artificial intelligence based on the personality of one of the human terraformers of the planet. The second plot strand follows the journey of an interstellar ark ship containing cryonically-preserved humans as they seek a new planetary home following a planetwide environmental collapse on Earth.

The novel received positive reviews, and won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel. The director of the award program praised the novel as having "universal scale and sense of wonder reminiscent of Clarke himself." The next in the series, Children of Ruin, was published in 2019. A third book, Children of Memory, was published in 2022. A fourth book, Children of Strife, is set to be published in March 2026. In 2023, the series was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Series.

Humanity reached for the stars, reshaping planets to into new Earths, then fell, collapsing into a war that buried their original world in a new dark age. In our absence, misfired experiments on the planets we had touched lead to a strange new intelligence. When the distant descendants of the terraformers abandon Earth, following the maps of their forebears to a new home, they find a world already claimed.

The series expands with each book introducing new forms of intelligence: octopuses in Children of Ruin, questions of consciousness in Children of Memory, and mantis shrimp captains in Children of Strife. Patrick Ness praised it as "entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human," while the Financial Times called it "superior stuff, tackling big themes - gods, messiahs, artificial intelligence, alienness - with brio." Tchaikovsky's zoology background shines through authentic depictions of non-human consciousness that avoid anthropomorphizing while remaining deeply relatable.

Film rights for Children of Time were optioned in 2017, though no movie has been produced yet. Critics compare it to Stephen Baxter's Evolution for epic historical sweep, Peter F. Hamilton's space operas for scope, and David Brin's uplift novels for exploring non-human intelligence. The series asks profound questions: What makes consciousness? Who deserves personhood? Can species with fundamentally different minds coexist? Tchaikovsky's answer suggests empathy transcends biology - "the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too - conquers all, in the end."

Perfect for readers seeking hard science fiction with evolutionary worldbuilding, explorations of truly alien minds, optimistic sci-fi about cooperation over conquest, and stories proving intelligence takes infinite forms - though genuinely not recommended if you have arachnophobia.