Children of Time (Children of Time #1)

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Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Time (Children of Time #1) (2015)

609 pages

Published Sept. 30, 2015

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5 stars (2 reviews)

Children of Time is a 2015 science fiction novel by author Adrian Tchaikovsky. The work was praised by the Financial Times for "tackling big themes—gods, messiahs, artificial intelligence, alienness—with brio."It was selected from a shortlist of six works and a total pool of 113 books to be awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction of the year in August 2016. The director of the award program said that the novel has a "universal scale and sense of wonder reminiscent of Clarke himself."In July 2017, the rights were optioned for a potential film adaptation.A sequel, Children of Ruin, was published in 2019.

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5 stars

The Book starts out with the human interstellar empire at its peak, and the greatest human scientist, Dr. Avrana Kern, is watching the disastrous end of an experiment to terraform a planet that is several light years away from earth, and try to recreate human evolution there.

Unknown to her, a catastrophe is about to befall the empire she knows, plunging humanity into the dark ages and relegating her experiment to mere legend.

After they are able to salvage a ship from the ruins of the old world, the last colony of humans are on their way to that same planet, seeking a place to set down roots and grow once more.

This sets up a scenario where you are watching an alien invasion from the point of view of the aliens (the human beings). I found myself, very much like Dr. Kern, rooting against that ship that represented the …