Narratives of Human Inheritance in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time and Children of Ruin

Children of Time (2015) and Children of Ruin (2019) are a pair of novels which tackle themes of interplanetary exploration and bioengineered evolution. Each novel follows a small group of human beings from Earth on a mission to find potentially habitable planets to terraform, including a plan for bioengineering to allow for accelerated evolution. In the first novel, the inheritors of this bioengineering are not the primates that had been planned, but arachnids, and in the second octopodes. Later narrative threads follow humankind many thousands of generations later, to be confronted by ‘descendants’ that are human in intellect and society, while startlingly alien in their physical form. In depicting a proposed course of evolution in which the inheritors of humanity defy categorisation as ‘human’, the ontology of evolutionary narratives is at once challenged and reinforced. I follow Misia Landau in proposing that accounts of human evolution are intensely narratological, and that on this basis science-fictional depictions of ‘future’ evolution do not so much imagine outcomes for human development, but rather reveal (and sometimes challenge) the narratological framework with which our understanding of the evolutionary process takes place. Moreover, this has implications for ongoing discourse surrounding astrobiology and exoplanetary research. Science-fictional imaginings for the future of human expansion pose challenges to notions of human inheritance, and interrogate the narrative constructs through which we understand our own evolutionary history