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Children of Time

216 statements
41 feature instances
2 referencing feature instances

Children of Time	type	TVTItem
Children of Time	label	Children of Time
Children of Time	page	ChildrenOfTime
Children of Time	comment	A 2015 science-fiction novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky which combines a convincingly alien society with a compelling story about the last humans left after the desolation of Earth.The story starts with a brief glimpse of the human race at its technological peak: a society with the power and reach to travel to other solar systems, terraform worlds, integrate technology with their own minds, and begin a project to create a new intelligent race by uplifting monkeys on one of their terraformed planets. Unfortunately, it doesn't last. And then the real story starts.Thousands of years after the fall of the "Empire", as the historians call it, an ark ship from a dead Earth is desperately seeking a hospitable planet to serve as a new home for the tens of thousands of people it carries in suspended animation. Their technology is cobbled together from what they could scavenge from the Empire, their goal is to find one of the terraformed planets that historians think may have been left behind, and the stakes are very, very high: they have nothing to go back to and no idea if any of the other Ark ships have survived. The green, growing planet they are approaching seems like their very own Eden.However, thanks to one desperate, determined scientist, and thousands of years of patient evolution, the new world is already home to a race of thinking creatures - with a powerful, xenophobic guardian. And no, they're not monkeys. They have more legs. Eight, to be precise...The novel intersperses the evolutionary and cultural history of a race of giant spiders with the story of desperate human survivors trying to find a home. You might be surprised by which ones you end up rooting for.Children of Ruin and Children of Memory are sequels released in 2019 and 2022, respectively. These books have no connection to the Shadows of the Apt series, except Adrian Tchaikovsky's love for (and extensive knowledge of) invertebrates.
Children of Time	fetched	2023-10-28T16:01:34Z
Children of Time	parsed	2023-10-28T16:01:34Z
Children of Time	processingComment	Dropped link to ApeShallNotKillApe: Not a Feature - UNKNOWN
Children of Time	processingComment	Dropped link to GoodVersusGood: Not a Feature - ITEM
Children of Time	processingUnknown	ApeShallNotKillApe
Children of Time	isPartOf	DBTropes
Children of Time / int_115b9907	type	Starfish Language
Children of Time / int_115b9907	comment	Starfish Language: The spiders communicate through a kind of semaphore movement of their palps combined with vibrations made through webs or on the ground. Sound only registers as an incredibly faint vibration in the air, so the idea that humans use it as a primary means of communication doesn't even occur to them.
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Children of Time / int_19944e8f	type	Terraform
Children of Time / int_19944e8f	comment	Terraform: What was performed on Kern’s World, and numerous other extrasolar worlds within range of Sol. It’s never stated to what extent this was practiced within Sol, however.
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Children of Time / int_1e7c47ab	type	Stealth Pun
Children of Time / int_1e7c47ab	comment	Stealth Pun: Near the end of the book, the spiders have created a World Wide Web
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Children of Time / int_1faf34ad	type	Prisoner's Dilemma
Children of Time / int_1faf34ad	comment	Prisoner's Dilemma: Discussed by the the crew of the Gilgamesh in regards to first contact with alien species (the Portiids, in this case). While the crew of the Gilgamesh sees cooperation as preferable, the failure case if they're betrayed is the extinction of the human race. Given the stakes, they see no option but to fight rather than approach peacefully. Fortunately for them, the Portiids are able to Take a Third Option, allowing for effective cooperation between the species.
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Children of Time / int_23f80ecd	type	Devoured by the Horde
Children of Time / int_23f80ecd	comment	Devoured by the Horde: Happens to several of the mutineers, at the hands of the ant colony they crash-landed next to. Also something the Spiders risk any time they're fighting the ants.
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Children of Time / int_25774afa	type	Generation Ships
Children of Time / int_25774afa	comment	Generation Ships: What the Gilgamesh turns into, after centuries of use, forcing some of the colonists and their descendants to remain awake for its continual maintenance and upkeep.
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Children of Time / int_25bc8511	type	Generation Xerox
Children of Time / int_25bc8511	comment	Generation Xerox: Averted for Portia despite generally sharing the same names. Portia 1 is NOT the same as Portia 8. They run the gamut from noble warrior, scientist to religious fanatic. The same goes for the Fabians but is usually played straight with the Biancas (except for the first Bianca who is different from the rest of them).
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Children of Time / int_2933bdf5	type	Genetic Memory
Children of Time / int_2933bdf5	comment	Genetic Memory: The spiders enjoy this, thanks to the nanovirus. Called Understandings, it consists of both experiences and practical knowledge that gets passed down genetically. They eventually become aware of it and learn to exploit it - first by mating with particular males so that their skills get passed down to the next generation, and then refining the process until they can just inject that knowledge straight into their brains, making every spider a near Instant Expert in whatever field is required (it does generally take a day or two for the memories to become properly usable).
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Children of Time / int_3130e2c6	type	Uplifted Animal
Children of Time / int_3130e2c6	comment	Uplifted Animal: The plot begins with a project to fill the galaxy with life by terraforming worlds and populating them with monkeys infected with the Rus-Califi nanovirus, which is designed to slightly mutate the brains of each successive generation of monkeys until sapience emerges. The terraforming succeeds on Kern’s World, but the monkeys never arrive thanks to the sudden destruction of human civilization. The virus, already introduced to the planet, instead begins working on the local arthropods. The effects range from a number of very large and abnormally smart but non-sapient creatures up to the jumping spiders and mantis shrimp who form world spanning empires (above and below the water, respectively). The virus was engineered to not effect other mammals so as not to interfere with the monkeys, but the virus being so effective on invertebrates in their absence was totally unexpected, although based on Kern's comments it seems the virus was expected to work far faster on the monkeys than it did on the invertebrates.
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Children of Time / int_334e48a1	type	After the End
Children of Time / int_334e48a1	comment	After the End: Human society collapsed into a small number of survivors on an ice-bound Earth for centuries after the fall of the Empire. Even then, they were able to bootstrap themselves into another spacefaring civilization. Then the ice started melting, and it turned out it was filled with all kinds of toxic waste and pathogens that soon led human society to collapse a second time. All that remains are a handful of generation ships built to Fling a Light into the Future and try to restart humanity somewhere else.
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Children of Time / int_3a90dc63	type	Aliens Are Bastards
Children of Time / int_3a90dc63	comment	Aliens Are Bastards: Inverted beautifully, with the help of the nanovirus.
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Children of Time / int_3c5ae1a1	type	Schizo Tech
Children of Time / int_3c5ae1a1	comment	Schizo Tech: Due to their non-human approach to technology, the spider civilization has a bizarre (to humans) mish-mash of technology. For example, they invented advanced chemical and genetic engineering before radio or even electricity, and Kern is baffled when she has to introduce them to the idea of wheels.
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Children of Time / int_44a893af	type	Humans Through Alien Eyes
Children of Time / int_44a893af	comment	Humans Through Alien Eyes: The spiders capture a live human and study her in detail. Due to their very limited hearing, they never consider the possibility of speech as a form of communication (plus, why would you use the same orifice to eat AND communicated?). After she shows the ability to learn and imitate their signaling form of communication, they conclude she is has a limited degree of intelligence, similar to the lesser spiders on their planet.
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Children of Time / int_4afa0e25	type	Bio Punk
Children of Time / int_4afa0e25	comment	Bio Punk: The spider's entire tech-base, largely based around specially bred ant colonies and organic chemical engineering.
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Children of Time / int_58962105	type	White-and-Grey Morality
Children of Time / int_58962105	comment	White-and-Grey Morality: There are no complete villains in the story; while some characters are more flawed than others, all of them are doing what they genuinely think is best.
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Children of Time / int_62434fe2	type	Sanity Slippage
Children of Time / int_62434fe2	comment	Sanity Slippage: Kern gets increasingly crazy over the centuries, as both her physical body and the machines she's hooked up to decays. She seems to snap out of a lot of it once she figures out what the spiders really are and decides to come clean with them.
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Children of Time / int_63f22889	type	Insectoid Aliens
Children of Time / int_63f22889	comment	Insectoid Aliens: Arthropods, technically. The reader understands their complex society and culture. To the arriving humans, they are giant, terrifying, venomous monsters.
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Children of Time / int_6439de78	type	Heroic Sacrifice
Children of Time / int_6439de78	comment	Heroic Sacrifice: A rather unique kind. One of the Fabians, when stuck in a high-altitude vessel with a near-comatose Portia and only oxygen enough for one of them, triggers her mating instincts - causing her to eat him, thus both giving her the strength to recover and saving enough oxygen for her to make it to the ground.
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Children of Time / int_6b496083	type	Sole Surviving Scientist
Children of Time / int_6b496083	comment	Sole Surviving Scientist: Avrana Kern is the last known survivor of the days of the Old Empire, thanks to a combination of Human Popsicle and Brain Uploading. However, she’s become obsessed with her uplift project, and when the Gilgamesh approaches seeking to settle on the only habitable world they’ve discovered, she doesn’t consider them human and threatens to destroy them if they try.
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Children of Time / int_6bda9a30	type	Meaningful Name
Children of Time / int_6bda9a30	comment	Meaningful Name: The spaceship is named after the mythological sumerian king Gilgamesh, who goes on a quest to defeat death and become immortal. Much like him, the crew of the Gilgamesh is on a mission to prevent death – of the human species, that is.
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Children of Time / int_716c0b1b	type	And the Adventure Continues
Children of Time / int_716c0b1b	comment	And the Adventure Continues: The novel ends with the descendants of humans and spiders, setting off to explore a signal from another solar system.
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Children of Time / int_7adc9fc6	type	Colonized Solar System
Children of Time / int_7adc9fc6	comment	Colonized Solar System: What humanity at the height of its technology became, colonising the outer bodies of the solar system through artificial habitats.
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Children of Time / int_90965cc7	type	Hive Mind
Children of Time / int_90965cc7	comment	Hive Mind: A literal, and scientifically accurate, example with the ants, which are not controlled by a central intelligence, but operate as a single organism the way they do in real life.
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Children of Time / int_95a44da6	type	Ant War
Children of Time / int_95a44da6	comment	Ant War: Early in their civilized history, the spiders were almost wiped out by the expansion of a continent-spanning supercolony of giant ants, described as the world’s first superpower despite not even being sentient. They’d dealt with ants in the past and even semi-domesticated smaller colonies, but the supercolony is so huge and so adaptable that none of their previous strategies work against it. They end up developing a bio-weapon that allows them to essentially overwrite the ants programming and add them to existing colonies, effectively domesticating them as well.
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Children of Time / int_974b47a7	type	Men Are the Expendable Gender
Children of Time / int_974b47a7	comment	Men Are the Expendable Gender: Played very straight among the spiders. For the majority of their history males are at best second class citizens who exist for the pleasure and comfort of females. They are routinely eaten after sex, and a female consuming a male outside of sex is frowned upon, but not actively punished. The shifting attitudes towards males forms a significant sub-plot of the book.
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Children of Time / int_a5ec714	type	Paradise Planet
Children of Time / int_a5ec714	comment	Paradise Planet: Kern’s World, a planet with large, lush green forests. Even the oceans are noted to appear green, due to abundant phytoplankton in the surface waters.
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Children of Time / int_a734c20	type	Black Widow
Children of Time / int_a734c20	comment	Black Widow: Female spiders often instinctively cannibalize their mates, though the practice slowly transitions from acceptable to outlawed, with the final step thanks to the work of a Fabian.
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Children of Time / int_abb930ed	type	Sleeper Starship
Children of Time / int_abb930ed	comment	Sleeper Starship: The Gilgamesh is carrying a cargo of tens of thousands of frozen people, in the hope of starting a colony somewhere.
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Children of Time / int_c37a9e13	type	Alien Kudzu
Children of Time / int_c37a9e13	comment	Alien Kudzu: The terraforming target Kern points the Gilgamesh to is completely covered by a layer of grey fungus from pole to pole. The crew are unsure if it was already there or a result of the aborted terraforming product, but they have no way to clear it regardless.
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Children of Time / int_c95d04f2	type	It Can Think
Children of Time / int_c95d04f2	comment	It Can Think: The partially-uplifted ants manage to invert this. Despite developing sophisticated behaviors such as glassmaking and metallurgy, they don’t think. Each individual ant is just a bundle of dumb reflexes, and the intelligence they display as a collective superorganism is pure computation, using trial and error to discover more efficient means of expanding the colony and then improving on those means without consciously understanding why or how they work. When the spiders finally get the ants under control, they’re able to exploit this trait to create ant-based computers.
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Children of Time / int_d0b95b85	type	Used Future
Children of Time / int_d0b95b85	comment	Used Future: Most of humanity's technology is based on scavenged equipment from the glory days of the Empire. It gets even more pronounced during the end of the book when the Gilgamesh starts seriously breaking down.
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Children of Time / int_d5656fbe	type	The Unpronounceable
Children of Time / int_d5656fbe	comment	The Unpronounceable: The Portiids Starfish Language uses a system of knots on thread to "write" and a system of vibrations and visual signals to "talk", neither of which can be rendered properly in our written language. Instead the viewpoint female is always Portia, named after the genus of jumping spider that was uplifted by the nanovirus; the main supporting female in any generation is always Bianca; and the main supporting male is always Fabian. As the narrative progresses, Viola is used when another main female character appears.
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Children of Time / int_dc1761bd	type	A God Am I
Children of Time / int_dc1761bd	comment	A God Am I: Kern starts out a little too enamored about playing God with uplifted monkeys, but she becomes especially obsessed after a few centuries of isolation and equipment failure. Guyen later trys to emulate her in a way, seeking to essentially become the living computer of the Gilgamesh towards the end of his life.
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Children of Time / int_dd8deee1	type	Xenofiction
Children of Time / int_dd8deee1	comment	Xenofiction: A beautiful example of the genre done right.
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Children of Time / int_df410b77	type	Decoy Protagonist
Children of Time / int_df410b77	comment	Decoy Protagonist: In a manner of speaking. Almost every spider story focuses primarily on a Portia with her exploits later being quasi-legend in later stories. While the seventh story begins in the same fashion with Portia as the main lead, the narrative and main focus shifts to Fabian as the main character of this story with Portia as the villain. Consequently, at the beginning of the eighth story, the Portia of the seventh story is forgotten while the Fabian is remembered as the Great Liberator.
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Children of Time / int_e0309d03	type	Slave Race
Children of Time / int_e0309d03	comment	Slave Race: The spiders manage to turn the ants into one after figuring out how to "program" colonies with any desired behavior by introducing the right chemicals to them.
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Children of Time / int_e5a93e61	type	Homeworld Evacuation
Children of Time / int_e5a93e61	comment	Homeworld Evacuation: The human race has been forced to do this as the ice age ends... and releases all the toxic waste left over from the apocalyptic war that triggered the climate change in the first place.
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Children of Time / int_eb4086e3	type	Big Creepy-Crawlies
Children of Time / int_eb4086e3	comment	Big Creepy-Crawlies: Downplayed. The uplift virus increased the size of the invertebrates it affected, which means ants the size of fists and spiders the size of your head, but no larger. There are physical reasons why giant bugs don’t exist in real life, and even in a more oxygen rich environment the spiders are said to push the boundary, even with new features required to simply exist at the size they are.
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Children of Time / int_ee13f24f	type	Space Elevator
Children of Time / int_ee13f24f	comment	Space Elevator: A much simpler proposition for an advanced spider civilization, given that they have their own silk to work with.
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Children of Time / int_fc52510	type	Brain Uploading
Children of Time / int_fc52510	comment	Brain Uploading: Used by the Empire when decisions can't safely be left to the judgement of an AI. Also what happens to Kern who leaves an upload of herself to manage things (including waking her up) while she's in cryo-sleep. Eventually the satellite she is in begins to fail, but spider technology has advanced enough by that point they they're able to copy her into an ant-computer.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

	Children of Time	hasFeature	Genetic Memory / int_6e35b70
	Children of Time	hasFeature	Sub-Lightspeed Setting / int_6e35b70

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