If you’re looking to squirm a little out of your comfort zone, Children of Time is hands-down one of the best science fiction choices with which to do so. The story follows two major plots that converge dangerously at the end: a ship full of survivors from Earth’s self-destruction, and a planet populated by a mad scientist’s experiment gone awry.
How awry? The experiment was to create a new type of human from rapidly evolving apes. Instead of apes, we watch the sentient evolution of something quite different from ourselves:
Spiders.
Don’t throw the book away! If you do, you will miss one of the most incredibly written lessons in empathy that you will ever read.
“Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”
There is something truly incredible about experiencing a world so wholly differently than your own, through the eyes (or more appropriately, feet) of something that, for most of us, instinctively pulls on our fear or revulsion. I’m not arachnophobic but I do enforce a very strong policy of social distancing with the spiders in my home: keep 6’+ away from me, preferably quite out of sight and they can feast away on any pests that enter my home to their little arachnid heart’s delight. Any closer and I used to be quite firmly in the “squish it” category. It’s the fast, easy, expedient method of handling the little rule breaker.
Not anymore.
Admittedly, the cats usually get any spider that’s on the ground in our house faster than I do, but if I manage to catch her before the cats do it’s off outside she goes. Now, I’m not saying this book will be a turning point if you’re arachnophobic and make you love spiders. Far from it. But Tchaikovsky has an incredible gift for building up a world so believably different from our own that it’s hard not to view spiders in a different light.
We have grand assumptions about how the world exists that is driven by how we perceive it. It’s foreign to us to consider viewing the world in any way differently than visually first, everything else second. It’s part of our failing in understanding our own pets (dogs perceive the world scent→sight→sound), and certainly a failing in understanding non-mammalian animals. Yet Tchaikovsky manages to build an entire world, an entire plot, with incredible characters, built on perceiving the world first through touch, then through sight. There is an incredible interconnectedness based believably off both the genetic changes done by Kern (the egomaniacal mad scientist) and the intense web weaving inherent to the spiders themselves.
“If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?”
If you are a writer, this book offers a brilliant reminder to consider the numerous different aspects of worldbuilding and race creation rather than just following the rule of cool. It is a reminder to delve deeper, to play around with every possible facet of your characters and world. To put your limited perception of the world aside for a moment and ask yourself “What if x?”
For the reader, this book places us often in an uncomfortable position and then eases us gently into understanding, empathy, and shows us a beautifully woven world fantastically different from our own.
It’s why I now have an old pill bottle on the coffee table for catching and releasing our spider roommates. I hope you’ll do the same.
-L.J.
Author of The Dying Sun, Book 1 of The Gods Chronicle.
Pedantic Scribe of the ‘Scribe’s Journey Podcast’
