My Understandings from Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky and Other Rambling Sentiments
“You can never know. That is the problem with ignorance. You can truly never know the extent of what you are ignorant about.” — Fabian, the Liberator
Having not written anything serious other than emails for almost the last two years now, it has been a difficult night, morning and afternoon for me trying to figure out how to piece together the words to channel this confluence of emotions that Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time has left me at. At this point, it is safe to say that I have given up that task and what follows is an incoherent cacophony of my cranial symphonies, left for the unfortunate few — you, who have taken up the task to skim over this sordid inconsistent billow of my thoughts. Godspeed!
A person’s journey with any book starts with how they have come about to read it — that bias which forms the cover we begin to judge these bundles of paper with. Sometimes we get them to sheepishly follow the rest of the world, or at least the part of it that matters to us— the bestsellers and such, sometimes to stick to a genre we want to build our self-image and thought processes around, sometimes we make chance discoveries on bookstalls and dusty libraries and other times these are explicit recommendations from people whose opinions we can trust. For me, Children of Time belongs to the last category— the expected yet unexpected one.
I have come to realize that observation and reflection over art I experience have unparalleled power to toy with my frame of mind —they can judge it, challenge it, mould it, model it and then make me come to this epiphanic confluence of emotions that I now find myself at.
For me, Children of Time explores two major themes — narcissism and evolution — through antithetical plot-lines for each. Through these two base themes, Tchaikovsky uses a revivifying perspective to explore smaller stronger themes. More of this later.
Many centuries from now; humans have reached the pinnacle of civilization spanning multiple planets and their moons —even exploring nearby solar systems and terraforming planets there. At the height of their biological and technological prowess, humans possess the capability to go into centuries of hibernation, whole brain emulation, even the ability to genetically engineer themselves to become true cybernetic organisms and other stuff you would expect from a prototypical society at the zenith of technological progress and evolution.
Through years of hibernation, your quintessential mad scientist and part-time piece-of-shit Dr Kern has been the shepherdess for humanity’s most ambitious projects, one such being the terraforming of a planet she calls Kern’s World. Kern’s World has been seeded with flora and fauna in preparation of an experiment. The idea of this experiment is to send monkeys and a nano-virus genetically engineered to make monkeys smarter through mutations that lead to greater brain size, bigger bodies, better neural pathways, the ability to selectively breed to enhance these learnings over generations — the whole nine yards.
However, her legacy is cut short as war breaks out between the two factions of this great human society of the future between people who want nature to take its due course — the Non Ultra Natura (NUNs) and others like Dr Kern who want to play God. The NUNs attack her experiment and she is able to get only the nano-virus but not the monkeys to this planet of hers. Against the tide of events, she is left with no choice but to lock herself as an upload on a satellite, alone in a cold timeless sleep orbiting this planet of hers, waiting for her ill-fated experiment to come to fruition. The war that started with the NUNs botching Dr Kern’s experiment ends with the complete obliteration of our world through this modern superior man’s modern superior weapons of mass destruction.
A paltry few survive on earth and humanity enters a new ice age. The knowledge of that ‘old empire’ is lost over the tens of thousands of years of this ice age and humanity slowly starts recovering, rebuilding itself, primarily through rediscovering and salvaging technology left by the Old Empire on and around the Earth. As the ice melts, it is discovered that the Earth below the ice left by the Old Empire — which they had previously come to revere and now to detest— is toxic to life. Whatever is left of humankind must now find a new home. As a last-ditch effort, humanity uses everything it has to build spaceships in hope of finding lost terraforming projects from the Old Empire’s maps. One such ship is Gilgamesh whose human cargo after a voyage of nearly two thousand years under the leadership of Commander Guyen has reached Kern’s World.
On Kern’s World, over thousands and thousands of years, the virus which was originally engineered to affect only monkeys does not affect any other mammals or vertebrates but through mutation over the years has a slower influence on the arthropods. Some species of spiders, beetles, ants and invertebrate aquatic life — particularly the portiid spiders.
Thousands of years later, Dr Kern, a human-AI madwoman, barely surviving and orbiting her experiment that she doesn’t know has failed is their messenger in the sky. Her ascent from madness from the immortal-mad-Goddess-in-the-sky to a humble observer and advisor of the spiders who she learns to see more as her equals than as a failed experiment is parallel to the descent into madness of the other narcissist in this story; from the calm and composed Commander Guyen who plans ahead for everything to the lunatic Guyen who wants to use salvaged Old Empire tech to be immortal, even if it comes at the cost of what is left of the human race. Walking through the stories of these two self-proclaimed Gods moving in opposite directions throughout the book is an exhilarating experience in itself.
The other theme, that of evolution, is explored through multiple generations of Portias, Fabians, Biancas and Violas as the portiid spiders discover their own versions of society, war, domestication and animal husbandry, religion and technology. The human society on the other hand is busy surviving — doing what it can to rebuild itself, where no discovery is truly a discovery because the Old Empire has already been there, always doing it better and humanity — or what’s left of it — is on a path where it keeps following the decaying ruins of the Old Empire — even to a point where it might repeat the same mistakes that led to humanity’s near-complete annihilation. This is best explored through Holsten, the historian, who is the closest this book comes to having a human protagonist.
From talking about the portiid spiders conditioning domesticated colonies of ants through their control of scents to act as Von Neumann computers to the use of spider-silk that the portiids use for maneuvering during space warfare, the spider evolution plot-thread finds Tchaikovsky at his absolute best. Even though the book lacks a compelling climax, the true beauty of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece lies in this thread of evolutionary world-building which is unique in the way that it pays an astonishing attention to detail as the spider society grows, adapts and seeks new Understandings.
The minor plot-threads constantly dabble with complex themes, and although the lack of depth in the writing here does not do justice to many of these concepts individually, it offers a clever perspective which brings the whole picture together. This spider society swiftly moves as the annals of its history are constantly being written through Tchaikovsky’s lens.
The cause and effect, as well as generational disintegration of deep-rooted gender inequality is one such thread. The early generations of the spider society consider the smaller sized males to be lesser, postulating that they are mindless beings unfit of even carrying their own names. Crimes against male portiids don’t hold the same punishments as those against the larger physically and socially powerful females, their deaths are acceptable and they aren’t allowed to host and lead their own peer houses. Then there is social inequality in the cities of these spiders — where the nano-virus has given the peer houses with more powerful ‘understandings’ that can be genetically passed a higher status. Seeing the spider society through this outlook; to read about the constant tussle that their nano-virus induced intelligence —which genetically programs the spiders to constantly seek more and seek better generation after generation — is at with their natural behaviour and biology is a thrilling experience which brings out the brilliance of Tchaikovsky’s thought process. Fabian, the Liberator — the Ada Lovelace/Simone de Beauvoir of portiid spiders is the centrepiece of this thread, a short but beautifully crafted character from start to finish.
Tchaikovsky gets away from some serious technical scrutiny by using time and the nano-virus as his saviour for most questions and doubts that come to my mind. But for me, the real power of this book is in the philosophical journey that it has taken me through. From Prisoner’s Dilemma to the validity of religion to contesting-the-validity-of-hard-decisions-that-favor-long-term-over-short-term, there is so much in this book I wish to talk about (even if it is in this weird form that feels more like an erratic salvo of emotions). However, that cannot be done without spoiling it for the occasional loon who may pay heed to my words and read it. While the former has a very low probability the latter doesn’t for this is a book that has absolutely been worth my time and money.
