Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time blends some familiar sci-fi elements such as a generation ship, anxiety of deep space travel and suspension pods, and the search for a new home planet after Earth is rendered inhospitable with some new and surprising direction.  The novel alternates between two narrative strands: the first line details the crew aboard generation ship Gilgamesh travel through interstellar space, scouring planets that had been scouted and seeded by their more advanced ancestors.  The second line follows the development of super-intelligent spiders on one of these planets.  This planet had been "seeded" with a nanovirus that was meant to speed evolution in monkeys that would help to make the planet more hospitable when humans eventually returned to the planet.  The monkeys all died in transit and the nanovirus infected spiders instead.

The super-intelligent spiders angle took a while to grow on me because Tchaikovsky endeavors to tell the story from the spiders' point of view, which can be a little dicey.  However, he does grow into the task a bit more as the story progresses and he moves beyond the initial evolutionary stages and shows a spider population with increasing alien technology.

Aboard the Gilgamesh, the Key Crew members transition in and out of suspension, essentially manipulating time and extending their own lifespans to counteract the difficulties of space travel.  The crew members use suspension and lengths of time to gain advantage over one another.  Essentially, the last one to go into suspension and the first one to awaken have the advantage because they can then control when the others emerge from their sleep.

Toward the end of the novel, one of the primary characters comes to learn that he has been in suspension for much longer than the others and that a lot has been going on.  As the Gilgamesh approaches its goal planet, we learn that key crew members have had children and there have been many successive generations born on the ship.  These generations revert to an almost tribal way of living and the captain of the ship uses suspension to appear once per generation and to create a myth of himself.

There are other surprises in the novel that it is worth checking out first hand, particularly the final confrontation between the Gilgamesh and the spiders on the green planet.

When I began this post a week or so ago, I found myself getting bogged down in plot and detail.  I edited some of that out before finishing.