Children of Time

In short: shortly before the collapse of human space society, we engineered an 'uplift' virus that can take a barrel of monkeys and speed up their evolution. Thus we don't just terraform a planet, but we seed it with human-like critters and hope to terraform a whole civilization from scratch. It goes wrong, of course - but it goes wrong in surprising ways. And THEN a generation ship from the post-collapse rebuilt human society (which is ALSO collapsing) shows up to investigate.

Noted on September 5, 2024

The thing I'm looking for in a scifi book is an interesting IDEA. I don't really expect them to be well-written; they don't need to stand alone on their literary merits. I mean, it's great if they do - LeGuin can do it! And this one was fine.

But this is a good one where the sheer invention of the concept powered through. 500-600 pages in and I was still being delighted and surprised by how Tchaikovsky spins out his central concept.

Noted on September 5, 2024