Children of Time (2015)
Adrian Tchaikovsky (1972)
600 pages
Successful novelists manage to make readers care about their characters and their characters’ experiences. The best science fiction writers, often setting their stories in distant times or places, and sometimes involving alien lifeforms, have an additional challenge: construct a society or civilization that compels and engages readers, that feels real – successfully accomplish what is referred to as world-building.
The story opens in a space station orbiting a planet in a distant star system. The planet’s surface has been terraformed to resemble Earth, and the project’s lead scientist is preparing to seed it by deploying shuttles that contain the seeds of life, including a nanovirus intended to accelerate evolutionary progress toward intelligence, reducing it from millions of years to some centuries. The goal is for a sufficiently advanced human-like intelligence to develop that can become a kind of support staff for future colonists. But even as the lead scientist gives a speech to her team in advance of the launch of the shuttles – her words and thoughts fairly dripping with wild self-aggrandizement and stunning hubris – events go sideways, with radical implications for the future of life on the planet.
When, centuries later, humans arrive again in the system, having escaped a by then dying Earth, they discover a beautiful, green gem of a world, and make plans to settle on it. To their surprise, however, they encounter already established life on the planet – a world-spanning civilization of beings that shock their sensibilities and expectations; and, more importantly, a civilization not ready to step aside for the arriving humans. Thus begins a wild ride of technological and psychological maneuvering to see who will survive a desperate battle for control of the planet.
From its first moments, through to nearly the end, the story becomes a kind of extended allegory of the old adage man plans, and God laughs. The surprise of the opening chapter, in that sense, becomes only the first of many Tchaikovsky presents to readers. Brilliantly, while these unexpected plot twists sneak up on a reader, in retrospect each has its origins in earlier events, if often only cryptically – Tchaikovsky never springs them on us out of the blue.
As I’ve written in other of my reviews, one particular enjoyment I get from reading is making connections to what I’ve read before or have been thinking about, and Children of Time triggered several of these. One such involves the intelligent life on the planet coming to consider the equivalent of the Turing test question: whether, compared to an advanced being, there is a point at which a compute device has “grown sufficiently advanced and complex [that it] would … feel the same to communicate with both?” (445) Certainly, an idea that, if in a radically different context in the novel, touches directly on the current discussions around when an Artificial Intelligence may become indistinguishable from a human being.
It is these beings’ reaction to this knowledge, just a few pages later, that has since given me pause as I reflect back on the novel; they find that “little focuses the collective mind more decisively than the threat of utter extinction,” (512) and quickly unify to develop the means to survive. I first encountered this theme in Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and I’ve always found it self-evidently true – adversity brings the threatened together. More recently, however, given the events of the past decade or so, I find myself wondering whether it is indeed so obvious what would happen. Even faced with a clearly imminent existential threat, would humankind really unify to deal with it? Consider the current, divisive partisanship in the US: would a substantial portion of the US population simply dismiss such a threat as a liberal or conservative – pick your particular political bogeyman of choice – conspiracy theory, and ridicule it?
And, indeed, Tchaikovsky addresses in his story this social tendency of intelligent beings to devolve into partisanship, blindly following beliefs that have become dogma. Both the humans on the spaceship and the intelligent life on the plant end up in conflict amongst themselves, whether over seemingly parochial and arbitrary beliefs, or an inability to reach some sort of compromise with one another. At least based on a sample size of two radically different intelligent life forms, Tchaikovsky seems to imply that certain forms of socially destructive behaviors come inherently with intelligence.
Other notes and information:
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
