Is there an audiobook of Children of Time?

Yes. Children of Time has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Mel Hudson.

How long is the Children of Time audiobook?

The Children of Time audiobook runs 16 hr 31 min.

Is Children of Time on Kindle Unlimited?

Yes. Children of Time was included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on August 9, 2026.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky book cover for the Book of the Day science fiction book review

Our score

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to Children of Time free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDJune 2015

Genres

Fiction Science Fiction Space Opera

Themes

EvolutionAlien intelligenceCivilizationDeep time

Children of Time

Name: Children of Time
Price: 2.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky

An uplift experiment gone sideways turns a planet of spiders into a rising civilization, and the result is one of the most ambitious and genuinely alien evolution stories science fiction has produced.

The Review

Our take

Adrian Tchaikovsky builds this novel on a premise that sounds almost absurd and then makes it grand: a terraformed world seeded to accelerate the evolution of monkeys instead delivers its gift to spiders. Over generations and across deep time, those spiders develop language, mathematics, cities, and politics, and Tchaikovsky tracks the whole arc with a patience that feels closer to a naturalist's field study than a conventional adventure. The astonishing thing is how convincing the arachnid civilization becomes. Their understanding logic, their gender struggles, their slow religious reckoning with a presence they perceive in the sky, all of it follows from biology rather than from humans in costume.

Running in parallel is the story of the last fragments of humanity, refugees aboard an aging ark ship who wake periodically from cold sleep to find their situation a little more desperate each time. This human thread is bleaker and more claustrophobic, full of dwindling resources, failing systems, and the corrosive politics of people trapped together with nowhere to go. The two timelines move at radically different speeds, the spiders advancing across millennia while the humans burn through a single increasingly hopeless lifespan, and the contrast quietly sharpens the book's central question about which species actually deserves the future.

What lifts the novel above its high-concept hook is how seriously it takes the work of imagining a mind unlike our own. Tchaikovsky resists the temptation to make his spiders cuddly or familiar. They are cooperative where humans are competitive, communal in ways that reshape everything from warfare to memory, and their breakthroughs arrive through means no human scientist would choose. Following their ascent becomes a steady source of wonder, the kind of expanding awe that the best science fiction delivers when it stretches a reader's sense of what intelligence might even be.

Why you should read

Readers who love deep-time scope and rigorous speculative biology
Anyone seeking a genuinely alien intelligence rather than humans in disguise

What to expect

Two timelines moving at very different speeds, spiders across millennia versus humans across one lifespan
A patient, field-study pace that rewards attention
A cool, idea-driven sense of wonder over character intimacy

Readers who need to bond with a single protagonist may find the structure challenging, since the spider characters are really successive generations sharing inherited memory rather than one continuous hero, and the human cast is deliberately hard to love. The pacing also asks for patience in its middle stretches. But for anyone drawn to the sweep of deep-time storytelling, to rigorous speculative biology, or to the cool intellectual thrill of watching an entire civilization assemble itself from instinct upward, this is a remarkable and rewarding book. It earns its scale honestly, and its final movement pays off the long climb with a vision of contact that is stranger and more generous than the grim setup leads you to expect. It is speculative fiction operating at full ambition, and it lingers long after the last page. It reframes how a reader thinks about cooperation, inheritance, and the long odds of survival for any species clever enough to look up at its own sky and wonder what else might be out there.

Reviewed by Rowan · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to Children of Time free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Included with Kindle Unlimited Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of Children of Time?: Yes. Children of Time has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Mel Hudson.
Listen to Children of Time free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the Children of Time audiobook?: The Children of Time audiobook runs 16 hr 31 min.
Is Children of Time on Kindle Unlimited?: Yes. Children of Time was included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on August 9, 2026.
How much does Children of Time cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $2.99, Paperback $9.20, Hardcover $1,336.70. Prices as of August 28, 2026 at 3:20 AM EDT and may change.

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Common questions

What is Children of Time about?: Adrian Tchaikovsky builds this novel on a premise that sounds almost absurd and then makes it grand: a terraformed world seeded to accelerate the evolution of monkeys instead delivers its gift to spiders. Over generations and across deep time, those spiders develop language, mathematics, cities…
Is Children of Time worth reading?: We scored Children of Time 4.5 out of 5. An uplift experiment gone sideways turns a planet of spiders into a rising civilization, and the result is one of the most ambitious and genuinely alien evolution stories science fiction has produced.