Humanity's last hope hangs on an ancient terraforming experiment. Generations ago, the scientist Avrana Kern seeded a distant world with monkeys and a nanovirus meant to uplift them into a client species. The experiment did not go as planned: the monkeys perished, but the virus found another host, and over thousands of years it drives the rise of a civilization of intelligent spiders.
Meanwhile, the last remnants of a ruined humanity limp toward the same green planet aboard the ancient ark ship Gilgamesh. Awakened in shifts across centuries, the classicist Holsten Mason watches his fellow refugees scheme, sleep, and despair as their dying ship seeks a home already claimed. When the two species finally converge, the collision of human desperation and arachnid intelligence will decide who inherits the world.
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and first in Adrian Tchaikovsky's acclaimed series, Children of Time is grand, patient hard science fiction. It braids deep time, evolutionary biology, and a genuinely alien perspective into an epic about survival and what it means to be a civilization.