Children of Time characters

Appears from the start

A brilliant, imperious scientist of a doomed far-future human civilization who launches an ambitious experiment: to seed a distant terraformed world with monkeys and a nanovirus that will uplift them to intelligence, creating a new species she can shepherd. When catastrophe strikes her mission, she preserves herself as a watching presence in orbit above the world, obsessively guarding what she believes is her creation across the vast span of time that follows.

Appears from the start

A classicist and historian aboard an ark ship carrying the last remnants of humanity in search of a new home. As a specialist in the languages and records of a vanished earlier human age, he is repeatedly woken from suspended sleep across enormous stretches of time to translate and advise. Mild, reluctant, and often out of his depth, he becomes an ordinary man's witness to events that span millennia.

Appears from the start

The capable chief engineer of the ark ship, responsible for keeping the aging vessel and its sleeping human cargo alive. Pragmatic, driven, and often exasperated, she is one of the few who understand what it takes to keep the last of humanity from dying in the dark, and her path repeatedly crosses Holsten's over the long voyage.

Appears from the start

The commander of the ark ship, who bears the crushing responsibility of finding humanity a home. Determined and increasingly single-minded, he will pursue any hope of a habitable world, and the strain of leadership across impossible timescales presses on his judgment and his methods.

Appears from the start

The name given to a line of bold, intelligent jumping spiders on the seeded world, the same name carried by successive individuals across many generations as the story follows their civilization's rise. A Portia is typically a brave, inventive leader among her kind, and through these recurring figures the narrative traces the spiders' growth from instinct-driven hunters toward a complex society.

Appears from the start

A recurring name borne across generations by learned, influential female spiders of the uplifted species, often figures of knowledge, science, or religious authority within their community. As with Portia, the name passes down the ages, marking a role in spider society rather than a single lifetime.

Appears from the start

A recurring name carried by male spiders of the uplifted species across generations. In a society where the much smaller males are subordinate and often at risk, a Fabian tends to be an ingenious male who pushes against those constraints, and through these figures the story follows the slow change in the spiders' social order.

Appears from the start

A blunt, forceful security and military officer aboard the human ark ship, ready to use hard measures in the name of the mission's survival. He represents the harder, more aggressive impulses among the desperate human crew as they search for somewhere to live.