From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] My review of _Children of Time_
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2023 12:11:34 -0500 (EST)

Here's a copy of the review I gave at the February 10th PRSFS meeting:

I read _Children of Time_ by Adrian Tchaikovsky.  Despite his name,
the author is British, not Russian.  This 600-page 2015 trade
paperback novel is set mostly after the next ice age.  The backstory
is that a few centuries from now a destructive war killed almost all
people on Earth, and everyone elsewhere in our solar system.  A small
number of survivors on Earth rebuilt civilization after the next ice
age.  Unfortunately, ancient poisons from the war that were released
when the ice melted doomed their civilization.  A few thousand people,
mostly in cold sleep, traveled, in an ark named "Gilgamesh," to a
half-legendary planet in another solar system which was said to have a
terraformed planet.  The Gilgamesh takes thousands of years to travel
between solar systems, unlike the ancients who could travel at close
to the speed of light.

It's never said how long the ice age was, but the Quaternary ice ages
seem to average about 100,000 years long.

The planet turns out to be real, but it's inhabited by aggressive
uplifted spiders and ants, not by people.  (By "uplift" is meant an
species of animal is given roughly human-level intelligence, though
they may think very differently from humans, and also take their
technology in very different directions.)  There's a hostile woman
or AI in a small capsule orbiting the planet who forbids them
from landing.  She mistakenly claims that the planet is inhabited
by uplifted monkeys, and that any landing there would ruin her
experiment.  (The uplifting was done by an engineered nanovirus which
was intended for monkeys, but which found other targets due to the
lack of monkeys.)

The story alternates between the perspective of the people on the
Gilgamesh, the hostile woman or AI, and the spiders, who are just
starting to invent science, technology, and ethics.  They haven't
quite given equal rights to male spiders yet, but they at least tend
to frown on killing and eating the most useful ones.

The woman in orbit who may be a survivor from before the ice age, or
may be an AI based on her, is Dr. Avrana Kern.

One of the most interesting characters on the Gilgamesh is Holsten
Mason, a "classicist," who has more knowledge of ancient civilizations
than anyone else.  He can even sort of speak some of the languages.
As such, he's the only one who can communicate with Kern.

One of the spiders is named Portia, presumably because that's the
name of the genus of spiders she's part of.  The author then takes
the naming theme in a different direction by naming other important
spiders Viola, Bianca, and Fabian.  (Those are all names of
Shakespeare characters, as is Portia.)  Those aren't their real names,
of course.  Their real names are patterns of vibrations in their webs.

Those same four names are re-used for later and later generations
of spiders, mainly because these spiders inherit their ancestors'
memories and personalities.

Dr. Kern gives the Gilgamesh directions to what is supposed to be
another terraformed planet.  By the time it gets there, finds that
the planet is uninhabitable, and returns, which takes thousands
of years, the spiders, in league with Dr. Kern, have built a very
powerful militarized civilization in anticipation of their return.
(Did you know that spider silk is stronger than steel?  The perfect
material to make spaceships out of.)  It seems that either the spiders
or the human race are sure to be wiped out, or most likely both.
The resolution is surprising and somewhat disturbing.

One thing I found implausible about the war that wrecked our
civilization is that there's a computer virus that can crash every
computer.  It's transmitted to all the off-world colonies in our solar
system by radio.  It's then somehow impossible to simply reboot any of
the computers, or to reload them from clean backups.  Neither have the
off-world colonies arranged for manual backup procedures, even for
life-critical functions.  When the virus is received at an off-world
colony, everything just unrecoverably stops working, and since those
worlds aren't terraformed, everyone quickly dies.  I find it hard to
believe any designer would be that stupid.  If I designed the computers,
I would maintain a rigid distinction between text to be displayed on
a screen, sounds to be played through speakers, video to be displayed
on a screen, and programs to be run.  No programs would be run without
the explicit consent of the colonists.  Doing otherwise is like a person
who, whenever they see a hypodermic needle on the ground, pick it up
and inject themselves with it.  I believe the fact that some computers
today behave that way will be looked back on by future generations
with incredulity.

Quite aside from that, I think computer security should be a solved
problem within a very few years.  Programming is basically just math,
and it should be as impossible to hack a properly secured operating
system as it is to find an integer hiding between six and seven.

Possibly the computers were designed with built in back doors by the
rulers of Earth to keep the colonists from getting too powerful.
Imagine if in 1776 the British Empire had the power to remotely cut
off the US's air, water, and warmth.

But in one way, their computers are much more advanced than ours.
Tens of thousands of years from now, the computer memories are all
still perfectly readable.  By contrast, it's estimated that today's
flash drives will retain data for at most about 20 years.

There are two other novels in the trilogy, _Children of Ruin_ and
_Children of Memory_.  I'm halfway through the former, which features
spiders, humans, uplifted octopuses (octopi? octopodes?), and true
aliens.