Children of Time Literary Elements

Science Fiction / Space Opera

The novel is initially set in the near future on the spaceship Brin 2 then later two millennia into the future on Gilgamesh. Simultaneously, the parallel narrative is set in Kern’s World, the terraformed world.

Third-person narration

Desolate, Lonely, Bleak, Eerie

The protagonist of the narrative shifts constantly but includes Dr. Kern, Commander Guyen, Holsten Mason, and among the spiders Portia, Fabian, and Bianca. The role of these characters also changes into antagonists depending on the time period.

In the beginning, an expedition led by Dr. Kern aims at terraforming a planet that will be named after her to create a new civilization. The experiment goes wrong but this will be discovered years later when the crew of Gilgamesh looks for this planet. The new civilization of spiders evolves over time surpassing human intelligence as the human survivors wander and gradually die off in space. The contact between the two species initiates a potentially life-threatening conflict.

The climax reaches when the spiders infect the human survivors with a virus that rewires their brain to view the species differently.

In the multiple generations of the spiders the personality of Portia, Bianca and Fabian foreshadow how the descendants with these names will conduct themselves in the future.

“‘This is where mankind takes its next great step.’ Her speech had taken more of her time than any technical details over the last two days. She almost went on with the line about them becoming gods, but that was for her only.”

The narrative alludes to the process of societal development where civilizations evolve, learn and unlearn as they improve their way of life.

“The wall screens told a pleasant fiction, a composite view of the world below that ignored their constant spin, showing the planet as hanging stationary-still off in space: the green marble to match the blue marble of home, twenty light years away. Earth had been green, in her day, though her colours had faded since. Perhaps never as green as this beautifully crafted world though, where even the oceans glittered emerald with the phytoplankton maintaining the oxygen balance within its atmosphere.”

“That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”

The novel parallels stories from different eras and in multiple settings showcasing the process of evolution or disintegration. While the human civilization is collapsing and the survivors seeking a new planet, the spider colony is evolving and developing language and knowledge.

“If there’s some old-world way of overriding its programming”

The old world in the narrative refers to Earth when humans still lived on it.

“Portia has no thoughts. Her sixty thousand neurons barely form a brain, contrasted with a human’s one hundred billion. But something goes on in that tiny knot of tissue. She has already recognized her enemy”