Reviews with content warning for Body horror - Children of Time

Reviews tagging 'Body horror'

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

11 reviews

linda_wolf's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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leemartin91's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark funny inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This book rides into some pretty classic sci-fi philosophy with gleeful abandon. I think if it had gone wrong then it could have felt like too much of a grab-bag ("if I throw enough concepts at them it will be taken seriously"), but I think it works for Tchaikovsky - he uses them as things to drive the story forward and have characters interact, rather than hanging up and pontificating on them.

Would strongly recommend.

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araebird's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

At first I found it difficult to get behind a main character that's also a spider, let alone entire spider colonies. But Tchaikovsky makes it so easy to root for them, and by the end of the book Portia and Bianca were my favourite characters. The units of time are so immense that at times it's difficult to comprehend, but I loved being able to see the evolution fo the spiders over thousands of years.

Listening to the audiobook alongside the physical book helped make sense of Dr Kern's predicament

while her sanity declines and merges with a computer

. While there are some science-y elements in this book, it's not at all hard to follow, and if you don't understand them you'll still be able to follow the plot. If you're normally a high-fantasy reader who wants to get into sci-fi, this is a good book to start with since it follows multiple perspectives throughout.

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jillysmith's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

It's strange to say that a book which follows generations of people across millennia is character driven, but this is a glorious book. I could never conceive of writing something like this but I loved the experience. Children of Time follows two civilisations across millennia as they evolve and plot a collision course with one another. They find, confront, and replace their gods and build cities and yet it is an incredibly intimate story of romance and family

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talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

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adventurous tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

maybe just the mood I'm in but it never quite clicked for me :( the spiders were cool though

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toopunkrockforshul's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Really loved this book, such an interesting premise and it really explores the full depths of everything that it sets up.

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micheala's review against another edition

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This book has a really cool premise, in terms of post apocalyptic SciFi. The set up is that humans had started terraforming the galaxy before a nuclear war destroyed all humans living off planet, and threw Earth into an ice age.

We then get a ship with a few thousand of the remaining humans centuries later, travelling through space (in stais) in the hopes of finding a new home.

The planet they do eventually arrive at was supposed to be an experiment to "speed run" evolution and create new humans from monkeys + an engineered virus. However, those monkeys died being sent to the planet, and giant senteant insects evolve instead.

Cool right? I had a few quibbles with the spider sections (they don't know what humans/earth is, and they don't know about the virus let alone how it functions, so stop talking about it in the narrative portions of their sections; and I was kinda disappointed that their society also was fundamentally sexist and pretty much a 1:1 of humans in the medial ages in terms of society)

The humans finally get onto the planet, and we get drop kicked into full on horror, specifically graphic body horror. So I noped out of a story I was otherwise enjoying at 37%

If you're cool with horror, I'm guessing this book is going to continue to play with some really interesting ideas, however as someone who cannot deal with horror, it's a DNF for me.

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