Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is some of the best science fiction I've read recently. I love everything about this book: far future space travel, both human and non-human protagonists, a classicist as an essential crew member, deep thoughts about history, time, society, gender, intelligence, violence, biology, religion, science, and so much more.
I've put off writing a full review, because there's just so much going on in this book that I'm afraid I'll forget something important. At around 600 pages, it's not a short book, but it created a sort of time dilation in my reading experience: I read it fairly quickly (most of it in a weekend), but I feel like I traversed enough material for three or four novels in the time it took me to read one.
But I really want to review this book, so I figure I'll risk it. There's a lot more cool stuff going on in this book than I can hope to discuss in a review, so I'll focus on a few things under the theme "humanities in space" with a playful nod to "humanities" both as a plural and as a domain of intellectual activity encompassing history, philosophy, religion, rhetoric, literature, art history, languages, etc.
Starting with the plural, there is a sense in which there are different humanities in the different waves of space travelers, first with a scientist who arrived to try an experiment on the planet and secondly with the last remnants of a dying Earth who arrive thousands of years later.
Time gets wonky due to relativity and hibernation technologies that allow individual humans to live for thousands of years even if their subjective time is an average human lifetime. The interactions between the first scientist and the later remnants make for some interesting reflections on history and whether we really ever understand our ancestors (more on that later).
The second sense of humanities is going to involve some spoilers and a greatly enriched sense of "humanity." The following spoilers are mild, since if you've heard anything about this book beyond the back cover you've already been spoiled.
<mild spoilers ahead> <mild spoilers ahead> <mild spoilers ahead>
Okay, here's the spoiler, but probably not much of one: the original scientist wants to use a nanovirus to "uplift" monkeys in the sense of "uplift" from David Brin (her ship is even called the Brin 2). But the monkeys die tragically, while the nanovirus instead gets to work on... spiders! I suppose extremely arachnophobic readers may be freaked out by this, but the spider society is so fascinating that anyone with less than crippling arachnophobia will love them. Tchaikovsky does some of the best animal points of view I've seen since Stephen Baxter's novel Evolution.
The spider society also offers some fascinating thought experiments about gender and society in a species where females are typically larger and often eat males after mating with them. How are these biological legacies related to cultural legacies? Is biology destiny, or is it more complicated than than any chauvinist or narrow-minded sociobiologist would have it? And as the spiders evolve biologically and culturally, their society gets even more interesting, dare I say it, more interesting than the humans.
I also wonder if readers (especially certain types of human males) with a knee-jerk reaction to anything feminist, might find this alternate route to thinking seriously about gender (although maybe it's too much to hope that such readers will make the conceptual leap back to human societies).
So, the spiders aren't human biologically, but in a broader sense, maybe they're "human" in the sense of being persons (not that I want to be a biological chauvinist or speciesist about personhood -- I've been reading science fiction far too long for that!). Or to use "human" in the sense of "humane,"maybe the spiders are more humane than the humans and have something to teach us.
<end mild spoilers>
These different humanities raise deep science fictional, and very real, issues about otherness: how do we understand points of view radically different than our own? How do you recognize something both akin to and estranged from your own humanity? How does encountering otherness expand your own sense of your own humanity ... or to recognize multiple humanities both diverse and as worthy of respect as your own?
As for the other sense of "humanities," I found it absolutely heartwarming that the second crew of humans included a classicist. Contrary to the constant eulogies for the humanities in the face of the tyranny of "practical" (i.e., money-making) fields like business and the economically lucrative STEM fields, Children of Time dares to suggest that good old fashioned humanities will still be vital thousands of years in the future, even if the classicist is still bickering with the engineers.
This classicist doesn't study Latin or Greek (or even my own favorite classical language, Sanskrit), but rather the language of Imperial C, which happens to be the language of the Empire from which the first scientist comes. Got it? Don't worry if you don't. It all makes sense in the novel.
My own domain of the humanities is philosophy, but I'm plenty interested in classics, both in the rather Eurocentrically limited sense of Greek and Latin texts but also in the more expanded sense of other classical languages like Sanskrit and Classical Chinese (although the only language I've really spent a lot of time with is Sanskrit). I'm also interested in history (it's hard to be interested in the humanities without some interest in history).
Tchaikovsky doesn't geek out on the linguistic and cultural details of Imperial C as much as he does on biological details. For some really interesting linguistic science fiction, I'd recommend China Mieville's Embassytown or Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" (basis for the film Arrival).
Instead my mind went to something I think about a lot when I read big picture far future science fiction. While most people think that science fiction is about the future, it's also about the past, or more precisely a sort of broad historical consciousness. One of the biggest examples of this is Frank Herbert's Dune series. To think about the future is to think about the present as the past (Get it now? Let's move past it into the future.)
As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about the past (in my academic work) but also about the future (in my science fiction reading), I tend to think about the present in what's maybe an odd way. I find that a lot of people these days think that everything in the past led up to us today, as if we are the pinnacle of humanity and only we among countless generations finally have everything figured out once and for all. Everything in human history was leading up to iPhones and Tiger King on Netflix. Obviously.
But I think a careful study of history should show that everyone else in history thought of themselves in either something like this way, or maybe in the other popular way as a degeneration of earlier glory (this attitude survives in some fantasies of both the Tolkienesque and conservative varieties). Hard core science fiction fans might look to the future, or they used to before dystopian grimdark stuff got all popular.
Books like Children of Time can help liberate us from the prison of the present. We shouldn't unduly venerate the past, either, as in toxic forms of nostalgia. We may not like our ancestors the more we get to know them (as the novel shows).
A careful consideration of our place in time shows that we are merely a chapter in a novel we can only read backwards, and imperfectly at that since the earlier chapters are written in a dialect few of us really understand (if we ever do at all). We might be close to the end of this novel or far from it. Or... we might merely be the preface to another story all together, one that strays far from even its author's original intentions. And that's okay.
This liberates us from historical self-centeredness, too. It's not all about us. The novel dramatizes the idea that more we learn, the less it seems like we are here due to any conscious, intentional plan.
It also plays around with religious and cosmological concepts in ways I haven't had time to delve into. But one take away may be a sort of existentialist point: however we got here and wherever we are in the story, it's up to us to make the best of it for ourselves and any other humanities we might find.
See also my Goodreads review.
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