Reviews with content warning for Violence - Children of Time

Reviews tagging 'Violence'

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

27 reviews

yuripiano's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

5.0

God, where do I even begin....
This is easily, easily one of my favorite books of all time, no questions asked.

The way that different points of view are written is so deeply interesting regardless of who the chapter is about, and the juxtaposition of evolving spiders with devolving humans and the question of what it means to be human is just... so. incredibly. good. You really feel and pull for the spiders, and there's a sense of "humanity" tied to their un-humanness that's lacking in the actual humans that's super fascinating to read. i feel like i could talk forever about the crew of the Gilgamesh contrasted with their predecessors and how that relates to the spiders and Kern - it's deeply fascinating and exciting and really thought provoking.

i don't think i can sing enough praises - i'm trying to come up with things to criticize, because every time i write a review here, i'm like "this book was okay!" and then i just bash the book to pieces, but...
the pacing is snappy, the characters are incredible, and the constant tension of feeling the three main points swirling like they're in a whirlpool and you're just waiting for them to converge is such a page turner!

i suppose, if i had to point something out, some metaphors and such were very spelled out... but, coming from the internal thoughts/point of view from the classicist a lot of the time, i felt that it was fine, and honestly, i didn't particularly feel like it was talking down to the reader either.

At the end of the day, it's an incredible read, and easily the first book i would recommend to someone. If this book were 2000 pages longer, it would be too short.

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nonesensed's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
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

Humanity has decided on a grand experiment. Well, parts of humanity have. In a far flung future, scientists have found ways to not only terraform planets toward an Earth-like biom, they're considering experimenting with sapience. Where exactly goes the line between animal and "sentient being"? Cook up a nanovirus that will encourage rapid evolution toward cooperation and what humanity at this point in time perceive as intelligence, add a couple of monkeys, and sit back to watch it all evolve. That's the plan at least. Unlucky for the scientists, not all humans agree with playing with life in this way. The monkeys end up dead, the head scientist trapped in orbit around their planet, and the nanovirus finds a number of other hosts, with interesting results. Turns out a certain kind of spider works well with the programing - sort of.

What a ride! I flew through these 600 pages and each chapter was a delight of emotions and interesting ideas and scenarios. I'm usually character-focused when reading and thus I wasn't so sure how I'd get along with a book that spans uncountable generations of spiders. Turns out, I got along with it famously! Each chapter in the life of the evolving spiders drew me in, a complete story all on its own, and the parallel of humans and their evolution alongside of the spiders' (so to speak) was a wonderful contrast. And that ending! Five stars out of five, no notes.

Recommending this book to all science fiction fans who enjoy "what if these unlikely but interesting evolutionary and technological things were possible"-scenarios. Can't wait to read the next book in the series!

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mals_reads's review

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adventurous inspiring reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

holsten, my beloved

i liked this a lot more than i thought i would. read this for a book club and i’m not much of a deep space reader, but something about this book hooked me!

it isn’t overly explanatory in its technical jargon (which loses me) so it’s more reader-friendly than i expected imo!

i wish i liked the spider pov more than i did, but Holsten was the star of the show for me. i feel like he really embodied the reader — your average guy (a historian) with little technical knowledge or ability to keep the ship afloat just waking up every century show as more shit happens in their journey to rebuild humanity. very chill and fun

this is for you if you’re looking to dip your toe into a new & adventurous series set after the fall of humanity. maybe more factions later? 👀

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amorphousbl0b's review against another edition

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adventurous hopeful reflective tense slow-paced

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

4.5

A test of empathy, taking one of mankind's great anxieties - the spider - and bringing us on a journey alongside them that leads us to understand their completely alien society even greater than that of the human characters to which we ostensibly relate. With beautifully detailed worldbuilding, its reputation as one of the great works of modern science fiction is wholly deserved.

May cure your arachnophobia.

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maddie_can_read's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

4.25

I had a super difficult time getting into this book but I'm glad I powered through because I ended up really enjoying it towards the end. I did find it a bit slow and a bit plodding throughout.

I had a difficult time vibing with the writing style at first. I think it was a combination of it being written in third person but then also being kind omniscient narrator (like they knew everything about past humanity -

like comparing the spider pandemic to the black plague

.

And I just could not connect with any of the characters until almost the half way point. I don't think the author is great at characterization.

I kept going because I liked the premise and I read all these reviews talking about how weird (in a good way) the book was and just thought I'd keep going and give it some more time.

And wow, I loved it when things got weird! Having the structure of the book set up the way it is

spanning multiple generations

made it so some really interesting things could occur. Really liked how the two story-lines came to a head.

Lots of wtf moments

really was not expecting Arvana to turn away the last of humanity, the mutiny, the spiders holding a human captivity for decades, spider sexism, the captain wanting to become the ship and being kept alive by machines, the captain letting people out of some pods and them having generations of children that followed him like a cult leader, really loved the love story between the humans (how it was impacted by one of them staying out of their cold sleep for longer) and then the one between two of the spiders towards the end where the male sacrifices himself, and loved the twist/ fake-out at the end!

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severin's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging inspiring reflective tense medium-paced

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

5.0

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chelsea_nailpolishlover's review against another edition

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challenging mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

Dnf’d at page 350.

Listen I tried.. I really did. What sucks for me the most is I didn’t listen to my gut when I read the sample of this book before outright buying it and wasting my money of this trivial piece of work.

The actions against humans and animals and the way they are thought about in this book is quite frankly racists, ablest and annoyingly ageist. Ageist is the least of its problems though.

At first when the mfc was thinking disgusting thoughts and hints of racist thoughts about people, calling them animals and monkeys (and no I don’t mean the actual monkeys, saying they were less than etc. Incredibly speciesist, even against their own species. The egoistical aspersions of the person etc I thought I could look past it as a villain origin story, of a sociopathic individual and that it wouldn’t be a huge continuing aspect in the writing. Boy was I wrong.

Even the god damn spiders had the same thinking. The author (a man) really loved to pound out the grossest most stereotypical feminist propaganda imaginable. (And I’m a feminist). It was like they wanted to make a joke of women.

The crew part was the most interesting part of this book. But the writing was all over the place. You had no idea half the time of how much time had passed. Where they were currently. What they were actually doing. And it would jump from different POV’s almost every chapter. And then you would get back and generations had passed?!?!? How the fuck is anyone supposed to keep up with the story, the timeline, or learn about literally anything when we get 5 minute snippets of bullshit plot.

Let’s not even get to the impossibilities of the science fiction aspects of this book. Clearly the author has no idea how science works. Infecting a whole planet instead of injecting the monkeys? Let’s not forget the crystal 💀 and sending signals plz. I just couldn’t fkin do it anymore.

One of my last straws honestly was one of the characters calling people ret^rded. Along with the spiders becoming religious and basically becoming a cult for this god and wanting to destroy others if they didn’t believe the same. 👎🏻🙅🏻‍♀️

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nunchikoi's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Tchaikovsky's work has stunning depth in its world-building and well-constructed moments of intellectual and emotional clarity: it's so amazing how he manages to make a futuristic world that is far-off and alien hit so close to home.

A friend recommended this after I told him about my obsession with Monarch Butterfly migration in North America, who (fun fact) specifically don't fly over Lake Superior's entire diameter: scientists figure that they make a strange detours because of a mountain that might've been there ages ago.

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etosaurus's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

4.5

Content Warnings

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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