Children of Time

Finding hope in an unexpected story

Our Substack friend Tara Penry is opening her community doors again! She’s inviting us in to help her build a virtual Library of Hope. She asked us to write about this question: “What book or story or poem or song has given you hope?” To find everyone’s responses, you can visit the comments section of Tara’s post today at The Hallalujah Book & Hope Letter. There you’ll find links to all the posts about hope, in one place, in a library that anyone can visit for a fresh infusion.

Posts and podcasts at Nature :: Spirit are all free, always free. But if you connect with what I write or find it helpful, please consider a paid subscription if you are able. Every bit helps!

Now on to a book that—unexpectedly—gives me hope. With big thanks to Tara for the prompt.

There are simpler kinds of hope to talk about—the immediate, heartfelt kinds that I seek out in crushing times, when I need an instant dose of peace or comfort. Like Wendell Berry’s quiet place of still waters with wood drakes and herons, “who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” I’ve gone back to “The Peace of Wild Things” repeatedly in recent weeks, reading it over and over so every word stays lodged firmly in memory, available to call up at any moment.

Or Naomi Shihab Nye’s reassuring scene at “Gate A-4” in the airport, where weary travelers, all strangers, end up munching traditional Palestinian powdered sugar cookies and laughing together across barriers of language. “This is the world I want to live in,” Nye says. “The shared world.” And the poem’s final line always brings sudden tears: “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”

But today I find myself wanting to talk about a subtler kind of hope. It doesn’t bring that immediate flush of opening in the heart. But it too helps set my face in a good direction, helps me see a way forward when it feels like there is none.

And I discover, in hindsight, that I caught a bit of that hope in a book I read a few years ago that has haunted me ever since.

I need you to know how unheard of this is. I usually devour a book fast and hate to put it down, but once I’ve finished the last page I often—and promptly—forget everything about it: the plot, the characters, sometimes even the fact that I read it at all.

But this story has stayed with me, and I’m just now figuring out why. It’s the sci-fi novel Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Oddly, I even remember the author’s name, likely because it’s the same as a famous Russian composer of classical music, and I once played his symphonies in orchestras.

But this Tchaikovsky is a Brit, and his story is a richly imagined other world—and it’s the shape of his imagination in this story that feeds me hope.

In the distant future humans have terraformed an exoplanet—which means, I guess, that they’ve remade a previously uninhabitable faraway world into their version of Earth, seeding it with hospitable life forms and a friendly climate. In a grand scientific experiment they will try to accelerate the evolution of monkeys. So they plan to ship a rocket full of monkeys to this distant planet and, alongside them, a nanovirus that has been genetically engineered to speed up evolution. Release the nanovirus among the monkeys, wait a suitably long period of time, and presto, you’ve got a whole other world of humanlike creatures. Dr. Avrana Kern is the lead scientist on the project, and she hopes to make this once-hostile planet into Kern’s World.

But oops, enter some terrorists. Their attack derails the launch of the project into space, and the monkeys never arrive at the planet. But the nanovirus and Dr. Kern do, and she follows the plan. In orbit around the planet, unaware there are no monkeys below her, she releases the virus then sends herself into stasis. She will circle the planet for long centuries until her monkeys can wake her once they’ve evolved far enough to decipher the beacon and use its comms device.

But whoops, no monkeys, so the nanovirus lands instead among other life forms, and one of them takes off, growing their awareness, building civilizations according to their kind.

And that kind is jumping spiders.

In Children of Time it is not monkeys who inherit the earth, it is spiders.

And here’s where my reaction as a reader got really interesting. Because however much I may love spiders in theory, in real life I get twitchy around them. Every time. Especially the large or fast-moving ones. I’m glad the spiders who live up in the corners of Maui houses are not the jumping kind; they’re way more docile. When I disturb them they roll up peacefully into little balls and drop immediately into my waiting cup so I can carry them outside.

So you would think that a story of spiders growing large and intelligent might be the stuff of horror for me. But in this book it wasn’t. The author treats the spiders with such care that each of them, and each generation, comes alive in turn. They become real characters, real people. Some are truth seekers fumbling their way through murky religions (I studied religions; they had my attention!), some are engineers developing new materials out of the threads and soil of spider life, some are explorers, some political leaders. And each of the individuals, and each of the generations in turn, wrestles with recognizable problems, the kinds of problems we tend to think of as human but might be common—how can we be sure they’re not?—to any community-dwelling creature.

And the world-building in this book is beautiful. The spiders construct their nests and then their towns and cities with organic, spider-appropriate technology—images so alien and yet somehow so familiar that every description of their dwellings rapped on a door in my own imagination to ask, “How might we design things differently? More like this?”

And of course the spiders evolve complex communication too, and it takes place—of course!—along spider threads. When the spiders stand beside a thread, such as in a meeting room where threads circle the perimeter like conference tables, they can tap on a thread with their feet, sending out thoughts that others can read by touching the thread with their own feet and deciphering the message. Philosophical discussions take place by dancing on threads.

It’s not much more far-fetched than honeybees dancing out directions to an array of new home sites and the group coming to consensus. It’s just not that hard to imagine.

And it’s partly this believability that gives me a sense of hope. I didn’t recognize the feeling while I was reading it, but thinking about the book a few years down the road helps me remember that sense of opening—that feeling that is related to hope. I was drawn in to an alien awareness just as easily as following words on a page. It was not hard to imagine life from the point of view of creatures who all too often give me the willies.

The book grew empathy in me.

And even more—I don’t want to give away the ending, but it wasn’t at all what I expected. In the final showdown, when the last desperate humans from a collapsing Earth arrive to colonize this world, planning to exterminate the spiders so they can take the planet for their own, the spiders have their own battle plans. And as those plans unfold, we see who the spiders really are, and they are true to the characters we have learned to know over the spider generations.

Children of Time is a beautiful book, and though it’s already ten years old it seems to linger in other people’s minds too. Without much searching I came across an Australian writer who reviewed it just a few days ago. “Read this,” she wrote, “if you love … any tale featuring a monster that proves more human than its creators.”

And this comes close to the heart of my own hope: In a time when the people of my own country are unloosing the ugliest, meanest, hardest-hearted version of humanity, it’s exceptionally difficult to imagine a better world.

And however impossible it feels right now to imagine a world where people respect and accept each other, it feels even more impossible to imagine a world where people respect the other beings who came before us, the ancestors who terraformed this world and made it friendly for human thriving—coral polyps and forests, water and whales, bison, grasses, butterflies, birds. What will it take to make a human world where we respect these creatures and kin enough to stop doing the things that are injuring and killing them—and therefore, by extension, injuring and killing ourselves?

My question came to a head this week when a friend told me about a conversation he had with an Indigenous collaborator in Ecuador. The Ecuadorian man looks at American society and sees its fracture lines. He sees our problem with racism. He knows how intractable racism is, how baked-in racial supremacy is in people’s thinking. As an Indigenous person he suffers from it in his own country.

Yet this man said to my friend, “I can more easily imagine an end to racial supremacy than I can imagine an end to human supremacy.” And he asked point-blank: “What are you doing to end human supremacy?”

His words struck me like a thunderclap. Harder than ending racial supremacy? If it’s really that hard, how can we possibly . . . ?

But then I remembered all the people who are committed to resisting this current regime, this junta of cruelty. All the people who are dedicated to relentless kindness and dogged truthfulness.

And I remembered empathy. And into my heart stole a small memory of reading this book—when my imagination grew large enough to experience the world from the point of view of a creature I was taught to crush and toss away. When I was drawn into a civilization built by spiders.

It’s a radical hope that Adrian Tchaikovsky seeded into the world by asking us to identify with spiders. It’s the hope of empathizing with creatures we’re usually creeped out by.

If we can stretch our imaginations into this much spaciousness, maybe all is not lost. If we can grow into this much empathy—or even just imagine growing—maybe we still have a chance.

Maybe there is hope for a world beyond human supremacy.

And as Naomi Shihab Nye says, that’s the kind of world I want to live in.

Are you a sci-fi fan? Have you read this or any other of Tchaikovsky’s books?

When you imagine a world beyond human supremacy, what comes to mind? What inspires you the most?

Please let us know in the comments!

---

For digging deeper

Check out this interview (just last week!) with Adrian Tchaikovsky: “‘Children of Time’ Author Adrian Tchaikovsky on Aliens, Entomology, and Defining Science Fiction,” at New Scientist on YouTube, Feb. 17, 2025. When it comes to evolution, he talks my language: “Everyone gets fixated on ‘survival of the fittest,’” he says. “Essentially that’s a hijacking of Darwin’s message.” Apparently his newest book, Alien Clay, shows a world where evolution happens through symbiosis and collaboration instead, which frustrates the Earthlings of the future who have become so authoritarian they can’t fathom a world where nature operates outside of their own categories. For some hope right now, I’m reading this one next!

Find Children of Time (2015) at Pan Macmillan. It is actually the first of a three-book series—something I just learned while writing this essay—and the three books together won the Hugo Award for Best Series. I’m putting the other two on my reading list right away! In the same interview Tchaikovsky talks about how he was inspired by the research of Dr. Fiona Cross on spider cognition. He says, “There’s nothing people hate more than spiders. If you can make people feel empathy for spiders, that’s the prize!”

You can hear Wendell Berry read “The Peace of Wild Things” aloud at On Being with Krista Tippett, Dec. 8, 2016.

Read Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Gate A-4” at the Academy of American Poets.

I wrote about honeybee democracy in “What the Honeybees Know,” Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a Living World, Oct. 19, 2024.

The Australian writer is Emma Young, “Why I’m Breaking My Own Rules for Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time,” Feb. 13, 2025.