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A review by micheala
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Did not finish book. Stopped at 37%.
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.
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Death, Genocide, Gore, Gun violence, Misogyny, Sexism, Slavery, Violence, Xenophobia, Blood, Murder, Colonisation, War, and Injury/Injury detail