REVIEW: Children of Time (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Book: Children of Time

Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky

My rating: 3/5.

Premise: The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age—a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

If you hate spiders and bugs, then approach this book with caution. It's no real spoiler that these new "masters" are evolved spiders. As someone who is scared of spiders and most bugs, I was very nervous about this book. But I found after a while, I got used to the spiders and, whilst they weren't interacting with humans, I became desensitised to what they were. I found it interesting watching the spiders go through evolution and seeing the similarities and differences with how humans evolved. Whilst the spiders evolved, the humans showed a contract of a species devolving. It very much left you unsure who you wanted to see win this new earth. One downside was that the plot is jumps quite a bit. There are 8 parts and in each one we jump forward a few hundred years, so we have a new spider generation and the humans are woken from deep sleep. But overall, an interesting read (but points deducted for the spiders!)