Children of Time

Children of Time is a science fiction novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published on 4 June 2015. It was the 2016 winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which is given for science fiction novels, and Children of Ruin, the next book in the series, appeared in 2019. The novel has two plot strands that are followed in parallel.

A terraformed world was supposed to receive monkeys and a virus designed to speed their minds along, and instead receives spiders. Long ago an artificial intelligence was created from the mind of one of the human terraformers, Dr Avrana Kern, and it has been left alone with its own instructions ever since. Thousands of years later the planet holds a civilisation built by arachnids.

Their science, religion and politics are followed across generations as they work out what they are and what they might become, and the species is derived from a jumping spider rather than from the social insects of most imagined alien civilisations. Meanwhile the last humans are on the starship Gilgamesh, carrying the survivors of Earth in cold storage and looking for the world their ancestors' probes prepared.

When the two civilisations finally notice each other, the novel follows the encounter from both sides, and neither has an easy claim on the planet. Tchaikovsky keeps the two narratives separate for most of the book, so the reader understands each side before they meet.