Children of Time (Children of Time, 1)

Adrian Tchaikovsky has a reputation as a fantasy author, but with this book he makes the transition into hard SF. In scientific circles one often hears the phrase: "He is standing on the shoulders of giants." Tchaikovsky turns this into an art form. - I first experienced the literary technique of alternating between 2 parallel storylines in Mary Doria Russell's _The_Sparrow_. The reader knows that the characters are going to collide with each other, although it is unobvious just how. - He assumes that Earth possesses uplift technology, which I first saw in David Brin's _Startide_Rising_, without the need to explain it. He even names the first ship of this project Brin-2. - At First Contact, two totally different intelligent species must learn to communicate with each other. This idea resembles Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" or Samuel R. Delaney's _Babel-17_. - One of the races constructs a computer out of living beings, like Cixin Liu did in _The_3_Body_Problem_. - They also construct a space elevator, which they clearly purloined from Arthur C. Clarke's _The_Fountains_of_Paradise_. - We witness an epic battle between 2 cultures that are initially so alien to each other, that they cannot understand each others' motives, much like humans and the Taurans in Haldemans _The_Forever_War_. Tchaikovsky clearly performed due diligence on the sociology of his characters. But that's as far as I can elaborate safely. I liked to plot so much that I was willing to overlook a number of technical flaws, not the least of which was the idea that terraforming an alien planet was too horrifying to assign to human settlers, but uplifted monkeys were ok. Although I have made a sincere effort to avoid spoilers herein, many other on-line reviewers have not and I warn potential readers against that threat.

This is such an amazing scifi novel with some amazingly thought out cause and effect storytelling. The story structure is also just so clever switching between the different narrator perspectives and with the passage of time, even thousands of years, and written in a believable way! Definitely one of my favorite books now, and I can’t wait to read the next one!