Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Czajkowski)

Adrian loves insects and arachnids

Children of Time is certainly a science fiction epic in the sense of being impressive in size and scope. Originally written as a standalone, it became Tchaikovsky's best-selling novel and so, of course, has spawned sequels. This first book in the series is a chunky 600 pages, and the action of the story covers thousands of years of future history.

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No worries, however, as certain other species do respond well to the virus, foremost among them perhaps being, oddly enough, jumping spiders. Over the course of millennia the spiders grow rather large (dog-sized, I gathered) and much smarter, as do ants and some types of crustaceans. This is where the novel really shines. Tchaikovsky does a wonderfully entertaining job of projecting out what higher consciousness would be like for these unlikely species given their innate characteristics. At one point the spiders and the ants go to all-out war, and it looks bad for the spiders until they cleverly figure out a way to control the ants by manipulating the way they sense their environment.

The novel begins sometime in the far future aboard a space station orbiting a distant planet that has been terraformed and is on the brink of the next stage of development. Under the guidance of Dr. Arvana Kern, primates will be introduced into the ecosystem along with an uplift virus that will speed their evolution. (The station isn't named Brin 2 for nothing.) Being no fan of the directions that humanity has taken, Kern intends to nurture a new intelligent species that may perhaps avoid some of the mistakes her own has made. Things go catastrophically wrong during the setup stage, however, and through a series of events that strain credulity just a bit, the virus is introduced into the planet's atmosphere but the monkeys don't survive. Kern becomes the only surviving human member of the expedition after a coup attempt. Her own consciousness gets mixed up with the ship's AI, and she continues to watch over what she thinks of as Kern's World for thousands of years, not knowing that her primates are long since dead.

During this vast amount of time, humanity manages to destroy the Earth and pretty much wipe itself out everywhere in the galaxy except for one desperate starship (not even a ragtag fleet) searching for a habitable world. Ancient records lead them to Kern's World, but the misanthropic Kern-AI-thing wants nothing to do with humanity and warns them away. She is, after all, busy using radio transmissions to nurture the evolving intelligence of what she believes are her beloved primates on the world below. Unfortunately for the last remnants of humanity, the technologies of the old empire were far greater than those they now possess, so even their vast starship is no match for the weaponized countermeasures of the Brin 2 station. They are sent to the location of another terraformed planet, a quest that again takes thousands of years since no faster-than-light travel exists in this universe. But, before they leave, a band of mutineers manages to get past the Brin station and land on the planet for a brief moment in which the spiders unknowingly glimpse their creators and the humans witness a world that they view as a horror beyond words.

If things went a little haywire on Kern's World, they went completely off the tracks on the second terraformed planet, which is covered with one vast fungal network. Things are getting desperate for the last hope of humanity by this point but the crew of the Galactica, er, I mean the Gilgamesh, are able to avail themselves of some old-empire technology at this abandoned outpost. Their leader believes that they have no alternative but to return to Kern's World and fight for possession of the planet.

I'll skip ahead and assure you that the final battle is a scorcher!

What I've described is just the bare skeleton (or perhaps I should say exoskeleton) of the novel. The really good stuff comes in the growing awareness of the spiders over the generations, and in the changing relationships and situations of the humans over the millennia as they go into and out of cryogenic sleep at different times and over varying periods during their ever-more-desperate search for a home. The novel is complete and satisfying in itself and flies by quickly despite its length.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

 

Catherine Webb was born into the publishing business

What sets the time-loop story apart from the time-travel story is that in the time loop you don't go anywhere -- you're stuck on a hamster wheel of days. But, unlike the movie Groundhog Day or the streaming series Palm Springs, in which the protagonists live the same day again and again, Harry August lives an entire lifetime over and over. It can get exhausting.

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Harry's first life began a couple of months after the end of World War I, on New Year's Eve, 1918. The circumstances of Harry's birth were inauspicious. His mother, a servant to the upper-class Hulne household, had been raped by the scion to the family fortune before he went off to war. Expelled from the estate when she was found to be pregnant, Harry's mother later died in childbirth in the toilet of a train station. To avoid a potential family scandal when the dead mother's identity was learned, the Hulne's arranged for the boy to be raised by their groundskeeper Patrick August and his wife Harriet, as if he were possibly Patrick's.

Harry lived out his first life normally. He served in World War II and returned home to help with and eventually take up his adopted father's work on the Hulne estate. In time Harry died, as we all do, but was reborn in the train station and within a few years memories of his first life began to return. This was so traumatizing to the young Harry that he was put in a mental institution and committed suicide at a tender age.

Then he was born a third time, same train station, and eventually remembered his first two lives. In his third life, he dedicated his life to God but found no answers as to who or what he was.

Each time Harry was reborn, memories of his previous lives began to return around the age of three. Harry began to adapt, to use his precocious knowledge to excel in school and to better himself in life. But, in his fourth life, he made the mistake of confessing his reality to his wife Jenny, with the result that she had him committed to an asylum where he was drugged and restrained by a quack psychiatrist. While being held against his will in the institution, a spy named Phearson came to him and tried to get him to divulge knowledge of the future. Unlike everyone else, Phearson believed Harry's story and even revealed that he was aware of a secret society of people like Harry called the Cronus Club. "Like the Illuminati without the glamour, or the Masons without the cufflinks," he said.

This information allows Harry to eventually find a way to make contact with the Cronus Club. The Club's representative who visits him in the mental hospital where he is held prisoner lets him know that the only way out of his current dilemma is to commit suicide, which he does. In subsequent lives, Harry is able to reach out to the Club when his memories return, and these mysterious benefactors pave his way through the best schools, and so forth. They call themselves kalachakra, a Buddhist term that refers to cycles of time, and they keep in touch with each other via this shadowy worldwide organization that we now know is called the Cronus Club.

Throughout the book we learn that the guiding philosophy of the Cronus Club is, "Complexity should be your excuse for inaction." (This is also the guiding principle of classical conservatism, by the way.) The Club has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo through time. In extreme cases, when certain kalachakra have tried to severely alter the time line, it is possible to permanently eradicate that ouroboran's memory, or even to kill them before they are reborn (permanently ending their existence), as a means to restore the status quo. Members of the Cronus Club have found clever ways to pass messages back down through time to the past. When Harry is quietly dying his eleventh death, he learns from another kalachakra that a message has come from the future that the world is ending.

In his twelfth life, Harry sets out to discover who among his kind is so altering the timeline as to bring about the imminent future destruction of the world. His nemesis, Vincent Rankis, turns out to be quite formidable. It's only because Harry has one other special quality, which we've known about all along, that he is able to survive when other kalachakra are being wiped out wholesale.

Claire North, real name Catherine Webb, wrote her first published young-adult novel when she was only 14 years old. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was her first published adult novel. She was 28 when it came out, and it still feels a bit precocious because the novel spans quite a bit of history and ranges across Europe and Russia. It is necessarily a convoluted tale, as it takes place over fifteen lifetimes, but to North's credit the narrative is never confusing. The only thing I would criticize is that I never fully understood Rankis' motivation or exactly how his quantum mirror was going to end everything, but I suppose that was the mcguffin aspect of the novel. The appeal of the time-loop novel is that we all have thought about what it would be like to live portions of our lives over again knowing what we know now. North shows how that might be a "careful what you wish for" proposition.

Ghost Story by Peter Straub

 

The late Peter Straub was a master of literary horror

Ghost Story opens with a prologue in which a desperate man is driving south to Florida with a kidnapped girl. The scenario immediately calls up expectations of a sexual predator and a terrified child, but everything seems off. The man seems more worried than malign; the girl seems unconcerned with her situation. We cut to the main body of the novel, then, and it weaves so many intriguing tales over the course of its more than 500 pages that we forget all about the desperate man and the captive girl. When the narrative finally works its way back to them in the final pages, the reader feels a pleasurable jolt of recognition and comprehension.

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Straub takes his time in this novel, slowly building up a big cast of characters, a lived-in sense of place, and a complex story that stretches across decades. The first three quarters of the book are brilliant. The patient reader will luxuriate in the author's beautiful prose and his deft unfolding of the layers upon layers interconnected tales told by the members of the Chowder Club. In the final quarter of the book, however, as the narrative begins to build toward its conclusion, and as Ghost Story becomes more of a straightforward horror yarn, as blood gushes and disemboweled bodies start to pile up, the telling, ironically, begins to drag and the logic of it all wears disconcertingly thin.

The title of the novel is a bit of misdirection in that you eventually realize that the evil entities at work in its pages are not ghosts in the traditional sense. Straub hints, rather, that they may be immortal, vengeful creatures who form the reality behind stories of ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. To go back to the word "ironically" again, the story would probably make more sense if they really were ghosts.

Ghost Story is the very quintessence of a "literary" horror novel, and, even with its shortcomings, well worth your while if you like slow-building suspense. Stephen King fans will find that certain elements of the plot are reminiscent of Salem's Lot. But there's more of the EC comics fan in King, and more of Henry James in Straub. Me, I like 'em both.