Humanity is overrated.
The tenth anniversary edition of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s critically acclaimed Children of Time – an epic story of humanity’s battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Winner of the 30th anniversary Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel.
Contains the short story ‘Bearable’ exclusive to this edition.
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?
Born in Lincolnshire, Adrian Tchaikovsky studied zoology and psychology at the University of Reading, before going on to train as a legal executive. Whilst working in a Leeds law firm, he kept writing fiction and published his first novel Empire in Black and Gold in 2008 – the first volume in what became his critically acclaimed Shadows of the Apt series. It was inspired by a role-playing game named Bugworld he managed whilst at university.
Tchaikovsky has written over twenty novels, five novellas and several story collections. In 2015, he published Children of Time – his celebrated science fiction novel about artificial intelligence, alienness and humanity’s battle for survival. It went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award the following year, and the second book in the series, Children of Ruin (2019), scooped the BSFA Award for Best Novel. The third, much-anticipated volume set in the same universe, Children of Memory, followed in 2022.
