Book review by Corey
Children of Time
Children of Time follows the last remnants of humanity searching for a new home after Earth has been ruined. Their best hope is a terraformed planet that was supposed to be prepared for human life, but instead evolution has taken a completely different path and created an intelligent civilization nobody expected.
The book jumps across huge stretches of time while showing both the desperate humans in space and the development of the new species on the planet below. What makes it so good is that the science-fiction ideas are massive, but the story still stays easy to follow. It is about evolution, intelligence, survival, religion, technology, and what happens when two civilizations both believe they have the right to survive.
The Goods
- Excellent evolutionary science fiction
- Huge sense of scale
- Very original alien civilization
- Great world-building
- Big ideas that actually matter to the story
The Bads
- Some human characters feel less developed
- Can be slow in places
- The time jumps take some adjustment
- A few sections get fairly technical
- Very long compared with faster sci-fi
My Recommendation
This is one of the better choices for readers who enjoy big, intelligent science fiction with ideas that grow far beyond a simple survival story. The evolution of the planet’s civilization is easily the most memorable part, and watching it develop over thousands of years gives the book a scale that feels genuinely different. If you like first-contact stories, evolution, artificial intelligence, and science fiction that makes you think about what intelligence and civilization actually mean, Children of Time is absolutely worth the longer read.