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As a mercenary during The Mechanai War, there was no shortage of work, but Sigrid had rules. That she ignored her rules as often as followed them wasn’t something that bothered her. A last-minute job protecting attaché mech, TH3R, and his companion, junior officer, Tala Matapang was a tempting payday. Their mission: detect and capture a SPDR mech alive.
The Imperium’s infiltration and assassination mechs were difficult to find. They were even harder to capture intact. Trying to find one in an urban metropolis was next to impossible. Tala and TH3R will need to use all the lessons they’d learned since their first encounters with the malicious mechs to avoid going from hunter to hunted.
Can a mercenary, attaché mech, and newly promoted officer track and capture their elusive and deadly adversary?
Unexpected Contact is the follow-up story to Duel of Destiny (A Mechhaven Novella) and prequel to Pax Machina (Mechhaven Book 1).
by Brian Scott Pauls
If you put Andre Norton’s “The Stars Are Ours,” Robert A. Heinlein’s “Orphans of the Sky,” Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” David Brin’s “The Uplift War,” and Vernor Vinge’s “A Deepness In the Sky” in a blender on ‘high,’ you might get something like Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time.” This is a description, not a criticism.
“Immature poets imitate;” Eliot tells us, “mature poets steal...” Refugees from a ruined Earth escaping to the stars, a generation ship fallen into savagery, an epic sweep of future history, terrestrial species uplifted to sentience, even a culture of intelligent, spider-like “aliens”—none of this is new. After more than a century of genre science fiction, new ideas are rare. But Eliot also said “…bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Tchaikovsky isn’t necessarily better than Norton, Heinlein, Herbert, Brin, and Vinge, but without a doubt he gives us a unique and memorable combination of these elements.
In 2023, Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series won the Hugo Award for Best Series, and this first book won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016. I’ll review the following volumes, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory, over the next two months.
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Children of Time begins with Dr. Avrana Kern’s plan to seed a terraformed world with monkeys, along with a nanovirus meant to accelerate their evolution. When a sabotage attack kills the monkeys, the nanovirus escapes and infects other species already on the planet, including a population of Portia labiata (“jumping spiders”.) Kern survives in suspended animation emerging at long intervals to watch over the world below.
Thousands of years later, the ark ship Gilgamesh approaches the planet after fleeing a ruined Earth. This results in a confrontation with Kern, now psychologically unstable after long isolation, who is unwilling to share “her” world with the unexpected and unwelcome refugees.
Tchaikovsky structures Children of Time in a back-and-forth narrative which compares and contrasts the gradual development of the “Portiid” spider civilization with the technological and cultural decline of the humans on their decaying starship. Of the two, the Portiids are the most fascinating.
Trained in psychology and zoology, Tchaikovsky is at his scientific strongest when depicting how arthropod-type species think and behave.1 The real life Portia labiata ranks among the most cognitively studied arthropods. Experiments have documented specimens selecting routes before moving, executing detours that carry them out of sight of their prey2, and adjusting their tactics against spitting spiders of the genus Scytodes.3 From this framework, Tchaikovsky constructs a believable, and (which is more important here) a believably non-human society that nevertheless piques our curiosity and sympathy.
The Portiids even develop biotechnology allowing them to build computers out of ants:
Each colony has been carefully trained, by subtle manipulation of punishment, reward and chemical stimulus, to perform a specific service, giving the great minds of the spiders access to a curious kind of analytical engine, using the cascading decision trees of the colony’s own governance as gearing. Each colony is good for a very limited set of related calculations—a vastly skilled yet vastly specialized idiot savant—and retraining a community of ants is a long and painstaking task4.
Tchaikovsky goes to great lengths constructing a new species we’ll accept as “real.” And when the Portiids reach orbit, he drops an observation worthy of Orson Scott Card in Enders Game: “They are a species that is well made for a life of constant free-fall around a planet. They are born to climb and to orient themselves in three dimensions5.” Due to Tchaikovsky’s preceding work, we see this as a characterization of the Portiid’s established nature, not as a rip-off of Card’s “the enemy’s gate is down6.”
One of the novel’s weaknesses is that, except for Kern (and by the end she’s no longer even a real exception), none of the humans are as interesting as the Portiids. What’s worse is, they’re also often neither likeable nor memorable. Once again, Kern’s an exception—she’s memorable because she’s unlikable.
Tchaikovsky may have made a rare mistake here. He uses, as one of his primary human point-of view characters, Holsten Mason, a classicist whose main role is to decipher the ancient language used by Kern, which proceeds that of the ship by thousands of years. Linguistics may make for a fascinating academic discipline, but it’s not necessarily a source of gripping drama.
The predominant role of the humans, other than as a source of familiarity to the reader, is as a foil to the developing Portiid civilization.
Tchaikovsky describes humanity, represented here by escapees from a planet their species itself has killed, as “…devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself7.” He’s even more direct when he observes “[g]enocide—of other species and of their own—was ever a tool in the human kit8.”
This stands in stark contrast to the more harmonious, if still imperfect, approach of the Portiid species and civilization, a harmony rooted in genetics and their nanovirus-influenced evolutionary history.
The inevitable confrontation between Portiids and humans centers on a thought experiment in game theory known as “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Holsten imagines contact as such a dilemma: “We’d never be able to communicate, and even if we could, we’d still be those same two prisoners forced to trust—and risk—or to damn the other in trying to save slightly more of our own hides.”9 The Portiids, with a genetically engineered biology geared more toward cooperation than competition, see Holsten’s Catch-22 “as a Gordian knot, to be cut through rather than be bound by10.”
The Portiid’s proposed solution for cutting through that knot will land differently for different readers. Some will see it as a clever way to wrap up the book’s conflicting lines of reasoning. Some may find it an affront to what it means to be human. And while both are valid points, neither may be strong enough to elevate the literary status of Children of Time from “good” to “great.”
But as the introduction to a series, Children of Time works well enough. The world-building alone likely suffices to entice many readers to pick up the next volume, Children of Ruin.
Recommended for: Fans of space adventure, epic future history, and compelling “alien” species.
Not recommended for: anyone looking for a large cast of gripping human characters
Thoughts about my critique of Children of Time? Please comment below!
Artificial intelligence tools performed multiple tasks in the creation and publication of this article.
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For another example of the author’s virtuosity in this respect, see Adrian Tchaikovsky, "First Sight," in Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions (Blackstone, 2024).
On route selection and planned detours in Portia: Fiona R. Cross and Robert R. Jackson, "Portia's capacity to decide whether a detour is necessary," Journal of Experimental Biology 222:15 (2019), jeb203463; and "Route selection by a jumping spider (Portia labiata) during the locomotory phase of a detour," Animal Behaviour (2007), ScienceDirect. Popular summary: "Jumping Spiders Can Think Ahead, Plan Detours," National Geographic, 2016.
On Portia labiata hunting spitting spiders: "Interpopulation variation in the risk-related decisions of Portia labiata, an araneophagic jumping spider (Araneae, Salticidae), during predatory sequences with spitting spiders," Animal Cognition (2002), Springer.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time (Orbit, 2015), 288–89.
Ibid., 515–16.
Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game (Tor, 1985), chap. 10.
Tchaikovsky, Children of Time, 513.
Ibid., 590.
Ibid., 546.
Ibid., 590.
