Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Children of Time cover art

Children of Time

By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Narrated by: Mel Hudson
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £19.00

Buy Now for £19.00

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

Hyperion cover art
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) cover art
Project Hail Mary cover art
Dune cover art
Artemis cover art
The Martian cover art
Outland cover art
Jurassic Park cover art
The Singularity Trap cover art
New Spring cover art
Roboteer cover art
Berserkers cover art
Ilium cover art
Tracking the Trailblazer cover art
House of Suns cover art
Existence cover art

Summary

Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.

Who will inherit this new Earth?

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.

Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

©2016 Adrian Tchaikovsky (P)2017 Audible Ltd

Critic reviews

" Children of Time is a joy from start to finish. Entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human." (Patrick Ness)

What listeners say about Children of Time

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    5,233
  • 4 Stars
    1,827
  • 3 Stars
    545
  • 2 Stars
    147
  • 1 Stars
    80
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    4,766
  • 4 Stars
    1,714
  • 3 Stars
    473
  • 2 Stars
    120
  • 1 Stars
    81
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    4,856
  • 4 Stars
    1,564
  • 3 Stars
    473
  • 2 Stars
    166
  • 1 Stars
    87

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Tchaikovsky is still writing Symphonies!

This is genuine high-quality science fiction, in terms of pacing it's probably closer to Heinlein than Scalzi or Star Wars but it's innovative, well thought-out and fairly challenging. It's definitely at the thinking reader's end of sci-fi.

It has to be a clever book that gets you rooting for spiders and sympathising with them. This book covers issues of morality, decency, survival and has probably one of the most unique treatments of the age-old battle of the sexes I have ever read.

The treatment of time and lifespan is equally clever. There are almost three distinct timelines here. The relatively short-lived spiders together with the humans being able to engage in various uses of suspended animation could have resulted in a real mess with dozens and dozens of varied characters. I thought this was particularly well-covered with the implementation of a logical mechanism to provide consistency of character among the arachnids and longevity with key humans.

Mel Hudson does a fine job of the narration, no easy task this one making this in all a very high quality entry to the genre and I would echo Carl's thought's that we need more of this author on Audible. It seems Tchaikovsky is still writing Symphonies!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

81 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant

I enjoyed the originality of this book. It is told in such a way that I found myself rooting for both sides, and I felt the development of an 'alien' intelligence that is derived from something not alien at all was particularly interesting. The means by which the author deals with untold generations of spiders cohesively is also very clever.

My thanks to Adrian Tchaikovsky, and to Mel Hudson for bringing me on such an exciting, unpredictable journey. I highly recommend this book and will be looking out for more work from this author.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

67 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Felt cheated

Personally I think the synopsis is misleading which says that the book is about Humans colonizing a planet. Humans dont arrive on the planet until about a third of the way through the audiobook and even then most of the book is about spiders. Also I think Amazon should have a warning in the description as there is a fair amount of swearing in the book - not suitable for children IMO.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

63 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Cool concept but average execution

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I think I would use it in conversation because it raised some great discussion points, but no i would not recommend it to a friend. The narrator is really bland, and the writing, which showed promise in the first few chapters with the introduction of the first spider hunting in the terraformed world, it sloped off massively and never really recovered.

Would you be willing to try another book from Adrian Tchaikovsky? Why or why not?

Adrian Tchaikovsky would probably write good films. The book has a good cinematic feel to it and I really can see this book being adapted to the big screen, web cities, space battles with sentient spiders, hypersleep, ant colony supercomputers etc. But his skills as a writer leave much to be desired. I didn't care about any of the characters with the exception of the early hunting spiders in the jungle and Fabian, the male spider fighting for emancipation. The characterisation of even the human characters was sluggish and frustrating, and at the conclusion I found myself really ambivalent to who ended up on top. So thanks but no thanks.

Would you be willing to try another one of Mel Hudson’s performances?

Hell no. She's boring after the first chapter, her accents are laughable, and her dramatic monologue performances were really embarrassing.

Was Children of Time worth the listening time?

It was worth half the listening time. Some really cool concepts in it, I really liked the stuff about ants and the early hunting scenes, also charting the rise of a civilisation under different circumstances. But sadly no I think I would take back about 8 of those hours.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

35 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Average at best

To be totally honest, I don't know why this book has been given such high ratings, It's not that great really! Granted It has its moments where it starts to pick up but then loses its momentum. I listen to a lot of Sci-fi Audio books and I can say there is many better audio books to listen to than this.

I guess if Ray Porter read it then it might have been better.

Disappointing.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

34 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A beautiful take on evolution and hope

Loved this. Was a deeply satisfying story of humanity and something else... Wonderfully thought out intricacies of the evolution to sentience from an entirely different point of view and cleverly written to encompass great swathes of time with continuity. Who knew you could feel such empathy for spiders. And empathy is the fundamental message for us all if we are to not only survive, but also thrive.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

34 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

A Web of delight.

An interesting concept, very well carried off. A story that's engaging populated by interesting characters. I know more about spiders than ever before, but in a good way!
Superbly narrated by Mel Hudson.


Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

17 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Good book, but at times forced.

I do like the concept behind this story and for much of the book it works well. However it at times also feels forced and some of the characters do not seem to fit roles that were meant to have been psychometrically assessed (as is explained behind the selection for one of the characters).
While towards the end it feels expected, partly due to it's forced nature, it also was not wholly predictable, which was nice.
Narration was decent, again not great, but certainly above average, which seems to just fit in with this book.

If you're after an exceptional story, I personally would recommend you give this one a miss, however if you want a decent book, which is slightly different, then this could be a tale for you.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

13 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars
  • MR
  • 10-10-17

Unexpected gem

Awesome, wasn’t sure where it was headed but gripping from the beginning and literally weaves a clever story.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

12 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Gobsmacking scope

This was a new and intriguing story which is well worth a listen... it might even change the way you think. The reason I personally didn't give it 5 stars was that, given the story, there is a lot of description and passive voice. Add to this the very measured tone of the narrator I found myself drifting off many times. It took 5 goes to listen to the last couple of chapters. So, all in all, worth a listen but it won't keep you on the edge of your seat despite end if humanity type peril.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

11 people found this helpful