Recommended by a friend, it is a book that I now recommend to other fans of Sci-Fi. Avanna Kern is a stern scientist who only concerns herself with the experiments she wishes to conduct. She is now head of the “uplift project.” This project involves terraforming a planet, releasing simian life on the planet, and infecting them with the ‘Uplift Virus’ that will spur the species’ evolution until they can contact the dormant scientists who is in orbit around the planet in cold sleep. However, things go disastrously wrong when the human supremacy movement sends a kill signal that cripples all the terraforming ships throughout the universe. Although the uplift virus still gets sent down to the planet, the apes are killed when the space station explodes. Only Kern survives, entering the cryosleep satellite to wait until the simian species on the planet becomes evolved enough to solve the mathematic equations that will cause the probe to descend to the planet’s surface.
Without the primates, the uplift virus selects a different host and spurs their evolution instead. Early on, you’ll find out what the chosen species is, but I’m not going to spoil that for you. What I can say is that Tchaikovsky spent a lot of time researching the species he chose to be uplifted and knew how a non-simian species would have to communicate with each other, develop technology, and overcome the other native species of their planet. The story of the species is told over generations but the re-use of character names and traits in the different generations prevents the author from needing to re-introduce a character for every generation. Portia, Fabian, and Bianca exist in every generation of the species and most of their character traits stay the same. Portia is an explorer. Fabian is a scientist trying to overcome the gender bias of his species. Bianca is one of the characters that seems to evolve with the different generations. At first, she’s a warrior, but in later generations, she is a scholar and scientist who helps evolve the species’ technology.
The big conflict of the book comes not between the uplifted species and their rival species, but rather from the humans that find this perfectly terraformed planet in an Ark ship. The war on Earth has destroyed its natural resources, sent the planet into a second ice age, and decimated its technology. Knowing that their planet would die once the ice age ends and all the dangerous chemicals and radiation that had been kept in check would be released, Earth commissions several Ark ships to send out into the vast reaches of space, hoping to uncover one of the terraformed planets their ancestors had created.
But what happens when those humans interact with this new intelligent non-simian species? Will Kern let her experiment be interrupted to save the lives of these inferior humans? Will the species accept the humans with open arms, or will they instead choose to annihilate their possible enemies? A wonderfully complex and interesting read, Children of Time is one of those books that are the first that I recommend to someone wanting to get back into reading with an interest in science fiction and evolution.