Can Children of Time be adapted into film or TV? Entertainment (2025)

Yesterday I finished the sci-fi novel Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. As far as I can tell, it is one of the more talked about sci-fi novels released in the last few years. I have this quirk where when I'm reading something, either literature or even sequential art, I tend to imagine it adapted into live-action or animation. That led me to wonder about this book, because on the surface, it kinda looks to be unadaptable. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, not everything has to be turned into movie or a series, but it is an interesting thing to ponder about, in my opinion.

If you are not familiar with this book, the reason of why I think it would be hard to adapt it will become clear after you learn what the book is about.

The book begins in the far future, where interstellar humanity has terraformed planets and a scientific genius (with a raging god complex) by the name of Avrana Kern oversees an experiment to seed a terraformed planet with Earth life and uplift monkeys into human-like sapience and civilization (or apes, I read it in my language and we don't have separate words for them) via a special nanovirus that basically accelerates evolution in a guided way. Unfortunately, her project is sabotaged, goes up in flames and she barely escapes alive uploading her mind into an AI on a satellite orbiting the planet. Her monkeys/apes burn up and die, but the nanovirus makes it onto the planet and infects... a species of jumping spider. Nanovirus function, combined with the sheer turnover of the spiders turns them into a civilization of sapient spiders the size of a small dog.

Human civilization collapsed from a massive war shortly after the sabotage, driven by the same tensions that caused it. Millenia later, a sleeper colonization ship built by much less advanced, but still spacefaring humans is on a two thousand year journey to this very planet (no FTL travel), as Earth is dead and they are, presumably, all that remains of humanity.
Half the story is following generations of spiders through various stages of their civilization (with lead characters having same 3 or 4 human names given to them by the narrative for reader's convenience) as they deal with wars, pandemics, civil rights movements and scientific revolutions. The other half we follow a human crewmember as he is periodically woken from cryosleep to help deal with various crises and conflicts of the increasingly desperate humanity aboard the steadily deteriorating giant vessel.

Oh and there's also a woman fused with a computer who is steadily losing grasp on her sanity.

Some spoilers below in the videos exploring book's themes. The fan-animation isn't too spoiler-y is it doesn't align with the actual story of the book too much, but has the broad strokes.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7HKYk32OSw

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Zx6kCN_Js

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i1GW1pOYF8

So yeah, the reason I think this would be hard to adapt is the same reason this book is interesting. The fucking spiders.

In addition to the fact that they are, well, icky giant spiders, Portia's kin are some of the most convincingly alien aliens I have encountered. Their culture, technology (oh boy there's some serious fucking creative shit in that book), society, architecture is just weird and alien. Their personalities, values and emotions are in that zone where they are just relatable and mildly human-like enough, while being very much how a sapient civilized social spider would think, so audience could still relate to various Portias and Biancas. Still, we are talking about creatures who's very way of thinking is different from human's to the point where it is a plot-point in the book. The same is true for their communication as they don't speak with each other through sound, but by complex sign-language mixed with ground vibrations... like all dialogue would be subtitles (probably voiced subtitles) over a bunch of mutant spiders wildly gesticulating and stomping special spider-morse with their feet.

Between the sheer difficulty of adapting spider society into visual medium (it would also be epensive! shit would be mad expensive for live-action) and selling general audience on creepy crawlies as leads, I think it would be hell to adapt... and it would probably bomb. Animation is the most viable medium, but even that would be a bit hard to pull off.

And going by the internet it seems something is acually in production

I frankly have no idea how you can coherently cram a narrative that covers thousands of years worth of cryosleep and generations into a movie. This shit would have to be a series, whether animated or live-action.