Children of Time

[sawyl]

Following up on Adrian Tchaikovsky's Tor piece on generation ship novels of a couple of months ago, I spent a cold, rainy Sunday tucked up with his latest novel Children of Time, which combines a very long voyage aboard a battered starship with a mad scientist's experiments with forced evolution to most satisfactory results.

The story opens with Avrana Kern about land a cargo of monkeys and an intelligence-enhancing virus on a newly terraformed world. But just as the experiment is about to begin, a saboteur from a conservative political faction destroys the Brin 2 station, forcing Kern into a small sentry pod designed to provide a single observer with a place to observe the mission. Knowing that help is likely to be a long time coming, Kern puts herself in the pod's cold-sleep coffin and, just before drifting off, triggers an upload of her consciousness into an experimental AI system.

While Kern sleeps, thousands of years pass. Back in the solar system, her civilisation falls after conservative luddites destroy much of its technology, wiping out the extra-terrestrial colonies and sending the Earth into an ice age. Eventually humanity fights its way back from the brink and cobbles together enough of its technology to build a series of slower than light arkships, sending one of them out after the earlier terraforming missions of what is now known as the Empire, with the Gilgamesh send to follow up on Kern's world.

Meanwhile, on the planet, Kern's original experiment may have failed after the destruction of her original barrel of monkeys, her nanovirus has found a new home in the world's invertebrate population. Gradually, through a series of pivotal moments, a group of spiders of species Portia labiata slowly become increasingly evolved, first banding together into groups, later engaging in an existential war against a similarly enhanced group of ants, before finally solving a series of mathematical puzzles being broadcast down to the planet from the sentry pod.

The book alternates between the history of the spiders and a series of episodes in the life of Holsten Mason, the Gilgamesh's classicist — the only person who comes close to understanding the history of Kern's time. As someone who sits outside the ship's core command structures, Mason is barely tolerated by most of the rest of the crew — Chief Engineer Isa Lain is a lone exception — and spends a great deal of his time in cold-sleep, only to be periodically pulled from his coffin and into some critical ship-board crisis — translating Kern's ultimata into modern language, getting abducted by a couple of different groups of fanatics, and being dragged in to the mission commander's increasingly crazy schemes.

In many ways Children of Time reminded me very strongly of Vernor Vinge's excellent A Deepness in the Sky. But where Vinge is principally concerned with the progression of technology, Tchaikovsky's focus is on the forced evolution of a group of spiders and just how alien their intelligence and culture might be to a human — when the spiders develop a religion based on Kern's radio broadcasts, they engage in a series of muddled, cryptic exchanges with their supposed-god which are garbled on both sides by the other parties' mutual assumptions about the sort of entity they are dealing with.

Another important difference between Deepness and Children of Time is the generation ship aspect: where Vinge's humans stay hidden in orbit, Tchaikovsky sends his off across the universe in search of a better home. Needless to say the voyage is not smooth, with the long periods between the stars allowing the more Machiavellian members of the crew a chance to brood and scheme. The presence of cold-sleep technology, which suspends ageing for the centuries needed to allow the ship to travel form place to place allows the characters to leapfrog each other, with Mason starting out as the oldest crew member — Lain jokingly calls him old man — only to be passed, biologically at least, by his various crew mates, finally arriving at his destination in the company in the company of his descendants — all of whom have been pressed into service as engineers, keeping the two thousand year-old ship together until it reaches its final destination.