In this series of posts, I review six novels with alien communication as a main plot point:
- China Miéville, Embassytown
- Ann Leckie, Translation State
- Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea
- Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Children of Time (book 1)–reviewed in this post
- Cinxin Liu, The Three-Body Problem
- Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Quick Note: I am writing these reviews so fast that mistakes inevitably crop up. As I spot typos and worse, I will issue corrected posts.
Children of Time bk 1, Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2016
Children of Time, winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award, is the first of four books in the series also titled Children of Time (short-listed for Best Series by the 2023 Hugo Awards). They are Children of Time (the novel I am reviewing in this post), Children of Ruin, Children of Memory, and coming in March 2016, Children of Strife. Each novel is part of a complex story-arc, but each one can be read stand-alone. Confession: I have only read Book 1.
In Children of Time (novel, not series), Tchaikovsky addresses the question of alien communication with an answer similar to Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea (reviewed in my preceding post). Nayler quotes the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who in an influential essay in 1974 had asked the question, “What is it like to be a bat?” The answer, for human beings, appears to be: We can’t know. In Children of Time, Tchaikovsky asks, “What is it like to be a spider?” How does a spider think, anyhow? how does it communicate with its fellow arachnids? And therefore, when a race of sentient spiders encounters a human mind it believes to be God, and when it decides it desperately needs to communicate with the Deity, how does that happen?
An insoluble problem, especially since the Deity is actually an entrapped human named Avrana Kern, a scientist who has evolved into more machine than woman in her eons of orbiting over the the spider planet and attempting to guide its long evolutionary history. Kern needs to communicate with her spiders as desperately as the spiders need to communicate with her.
Dr. Kern takes immense pride in her terraforming experiment and is immensely protective of “her” planet’s pure environment, denying an earth ship in distress access to it even though her denial might mean the death of the remnant of humanity riding inside. For Kern, the integrity of her experiment is paramount.
Here’s the irony: Kern thought she was releasing (to use the first chapter’s title) a barrel of monkeys into a pristine environment. She planned to enable them to evolve toward intelligence and become even greater than the bickering primates of the human race, in the process of destroying itself. For Kern, her monkeys will be the redemption of the human race, and the ragged remnants of humanity begging for sanctuary will corrupt it. As Kern orbits above what she believes to be her evolving monkeys, she devises a simple mathematical test of intelligence, escalating in difficulty to gauge where they are in their march toward sentience, and beyond.
I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that her dream is thwarted (I won’t reveal how), and that the sentient evolving beings on the planet below–which she hubristically thinks of as Kern’s World–are not primate but arachnoid. Kern’s simple little mathematical puzzles need to change.
Like Nayler, Tchaikovsky asks us to imagine how a species common to us on earth but utterly alien might communicate with us, and how we might try to communicate with it. How do spiders actually move and see, how do they experience texture, how do they experience gender? These questions and more drive the plot, especially when the human beings on the escape ship from earth come back to Kern’s World and create a crisis for Kern, for the spiders, and for themselves.
One especially interesting technique Tchaikovsky uses: how time expands and contracts in the experience of the characters. Kern has been orbiting her planet for eons, and her view is becoming less and less human. The spiders, with much shorter lives, much briefer epochs of arachnid history, have a very different experience of the world they inhabit, so we readers gain insight into their thinking through various archetypal spiders in their march through time: thinker, warrior, hunter, inventor. Over the epochs of spider history, the individuals occupying these roles change, but the roles and names stay essentially the same. That was a difficult move to bring off in a novel, and I thought Tchaikovsky handled it in an interesting and convincing way. The refugee human experience changes over their own eons and generations, as well. Most of these characters are in hypersleep, roused for the good parts of the plot (or their children or grandchildren), but one character gives the reader some continuity to hang onto, dragged out of his long nap for every major conflict.
I enjoyed this novel very much. Its promotional blurbs describe it as “space opera,” but I disagree. There are some fascinating, fleshed-out, thorny concepts here. Explored, though, with all of the thrill of good space opera. Full disclosure, I have arachnophobia, so maybe I’m not the best reader for this book, since I constantly felt something crawling on me as I read it. Trigger warning for fellow arachnophobes: the web page for this series on Tchaikovsky’s site has a photo of a big hairy specimen crouching at the top of it, probably a member of the Portia jumping spider species, source of the main spider character’s name. I’m not sure, though–I didn’t look too close. 😱
I should say that I found Tchaikovsky’s stand-alone novel Alien Clay (short-listed for both the 2025 Hugo Award for best novel and the Locus Award) much more convincing about the problem of alien communication than this one. In that novel, communication is architecture, biology, spatial relationships. It’s made up of the way a culture manipulates its physical space and inhabits its biological niche. Communication is the way the individuals of a culture and an ecosystem (maybe the same thing?) fit into the whole. I found that very intriguing, and the process the characters undergo to reach that conclusion very intriguing too, because it made me ponder what makes us human. See my quick review of that book HERE, but in that review, I paid too little attention to this fascinating communication aspect. I hope I’m rectifying that by mentioning it here. And I will also use Alien Clay for my next. . .
Speculative Fiction Advent Calendar of quotes. I give you the quotation for Day Three, Dec. 3, 2025:
Fantastes 