Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Key Ideas

Highlights

Sering (1.1): “You have to be stopped, Doctor Kern. You and all your kind – your new humans, new machines, new species. If you succeed here, then there will be other worlds – you’ve said so yourself, and I know they’re terraforming them even now. It ends here. Non Ultra Natura! No greater than nature.”
Sering (1.1): “In another few years, maybe, you’ll hear that Earth and our future have been taken back for the humans. No uplifted monkeys, Doctor Kern. No godlike computers. No freakshows of the human form. We’ll have the universe to ourselves, as we were intended to – as was always our destiny.”
Kern & the pod (1.1): “Listen for a change in radio signals. Wake me when you hear it, she instructed. / The pod computer was not happy about that. It required more exacting parameters… / Then give me options. / Her HUD streamed with possibilities. The pod computer was a sophisticated piece of engineering, complex enough that it could feign sentience, if not quite own to it.”
Kern / the pod (1.1): “The pod could upload an image of her consciousness into itself. Albeit an imperfect copy, it would form a Kern-computer composite that would be able to react to external events in a simulation of her own best judgement. She scanned through the caveats and notes – more cutting-edge technology that they were due to have pioneered. Over time it was predicted that the AI network would further incorporate the uploaded Kern so that the composite would be able to make finer and finer distinctions. Potentially the end result would be something smarter and more capable than the simple sum total of human and machine combined.”
Portia (1.2): “Her sixty thousand neurons barely form a brain, contrasted with a human’s one hundred billion.”
Portia (1.2): “Their children will be beautiful and brilliant and grow to twice her size, infected with the nanovirus that Portia and the male both carry.”
Portia (1.2): “those best able to exploit this new advantage will dominate the gene pool of the future. Portia’s children will inherit the world.”
Kern / the pod (1.3): “Let me sleep, she told the pod. / ‘I require guidance on when to wake you.’ / She laughed at it, the sound of her own voice hideous in the close confines. ‘When the rescue ship arrives. When the monkeys answer. When my undead uploaded self decides. Is that sufficient?’”
Narration (1.3): “Sleep for a long, lonely time. She would return to the tomb, and a simulacrum of herself would stand watch over a silent planet, in a silent universe, as the last outpost of the great spacefaring human civilization.”
Kern & the hub (1.3): “Just give me something to get my memories back together! she ordered. / ‘That is not recommended,’ the hub cautioned her.”
Kern & the hub (1.3): “‘Will you stop saying, “I’m afraid”!’ she rasped angrily. / ‘Of course, Doctor.’ And it would, she knew. That particular mannerism would be barred from its speech from that moment on.”

My Take

The terraforming + “humanity must leave Earth” premise conjures Elon Musk / Mars-colonization rhetoric — feels very timely. Worth noting it was written in 2015, so the resonance came early.
(1.3) “The great green orb that she spun about…” — the word spun (like a web) reads as a quiet nod to where this is headed: the spiders, not the monkeys, will inherit the planet.
(1.1) Lovely irony: a civilization that can upload a consciousness still can’t get the pod computer to act on a vague instruction — it “required more exacting parameters.” Right after fumbling basic HCI, Kern uploads herself. The tech is godlike in one breath and clumsy in the next.
- Thread to watch: the book predicts the AI+Kern composite will “make finer and finer distinctions… smarter than the sum of human and machine.” Across 1.1 → 1.3 (a 14-year gap) the hub already feels more conversational. Tracking whether the system keeps improving as a running thread. See Talking to Synthetic Assistants.

State of Technology / Zeitgeist Check

Running comparison of the book’s world vs ours — a lot of this feels not so dissimilar from our reality.

Theme	In the book	In our world (~2026)
Terraforming / leave Earth	Kern’s mission to make a new world habitable for a seeded species	Musk / SpaceX Mars colonization push; “Earth is a backup risk” framing
Benevolent / engineered viruses	The uplift neurovirus, meant to accelerate evolution	Gene editing (CRISPR), mRNA platforms, gene-therapy vectors
Accelerationists vs luddites	Kern & the uplift program vs Non Ultra Natura (NONs)	e/acc vs AI-safety / degrowth / anti-tech movements
Mind uploading / human-AI fusion	Kern-computer composite in the pod, predicted to grow “smarter than the sum of human and machine”	Mind-uploading ambitions, AI augmentation, brain-computer interfaces (Neuralink), superintelligence discourse
What’s hard vs. easy in AI	Consciousness upload is routine, but the computer needs “exacting parameters” and fumbles a vague instruction — fuzzy intent is the hard part	Mirror image: LLMs handle fuzzy natural-language intent shockingly well, while mind-uploading stays pure sci-fi. The book sorts hard-vs-easy opposite to how 2026 turned out

Ideas to Explore

Concept seeds sparked by the book — placeholder notes that can grow on their own.

Reading Notes by Chapter

Part 1 — 1.1

The “barrel of monkeys” mission. The target planet has no official name yet — some crew favor “Simiana,” but Kern thinks of it as Kern’s World (“the first of many”).
Avrana Kern aboard the ship Brin 2, briefing the mission; crew of 19.
Kern lets another doctor, Sering, give a speech — he’s part of the Non Ultra Natura (“No greater than nature”) resistance.
Sering makes his way to the engine core and blows up the Brin 2.
The barrel of monkeys burns up in the atmosphere; only the flask of neurovirus descends to the planet (Kern’s World).
Kern escapes to the Sentry Pod (taking Sering’s intended position).

Part 1 — 1.2

First Portia chapter — her species is Portia labiata (a jumping spider, family Salticidae).
She’s hunting another spider, Scytodes pallida.
Meets a male of her species — glimpses of cooperation between them.
They mate; she kills the male; she lays a clutch.
Chapter ends revealing the spiders carry the neurovirus, and hints at an evolutionary timescale.

Part 1 — 1.3 — “The Lights Go Out”

Kern wakes on the Sentry Pod, overwhelmed by data screens — “Eliza mode” (?).
It’s been 14 years and 72 days since she went into the pod.
“Sering’s war had broken out” — no signals from Earth.
One of the last broadcasts from Earth was an electronic virus.
Tabula Rasa (?) planets mentioned.
Kern survived because she had uploaded her consciousness.
“No known upper bound on our survival” — she/the composite may be effectively immortal.
Kern goes back into cold sleep for “a very long time,” leaving her uploaded simulacrum to stand watch.

Reading log

2026-05-31 — finished 1.1 and 1.2
2026-05-31 — finished 1.3 “The Lights Go Out”