Science fiction fans can save big on a box set edition of one of the most popular series of the past decade. The first three books in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series have been reissued in hardcover, and Amazon has marked the price all the way down to $29 (was $90). The 68% discount is one of the largest we’ve seen for a brand-new book box set. The Children of Time Hardcover Box Set releases January 6.
Amazon’s deal is especially noteworthy because Children of Time Books 1-3 were out of print in hardcover and sell for high prices on the reseller market. And with the fourth novel in the series slated for publication March 17, fans and new readers can now have matching editions of all four Children of Time novels. Even for new readers, the box set costs less than you’d spend on the paperback editions (roughly $39).
$29 (was $90) | Releases January 6
Children of Time is a space opera chronicling humanity’s migration from an uninhabitable Earth to a terraformed exoplanet. The only problem with this plan is that their new home has been occupied by genetically modified spiders for thousands of years. These arachnoids evolved and thrived with the help of an AI version of a human who worked on the terraforming project.
The 2015 novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The 2019 sequel Children of Ruin won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Children of Memory, the third book in the series, was published in 2023, the same year Children of Time received the Hugo Award for Best Series.
In addition to the strangely low price, there’s another peculiar detail about the Children of Time Box Set: The advertised page count appears to be way underselling the length of the first three books.
Store pages at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and several other retailers list the page count for the box set as 1,136. This is almost certainly a typo, because the total page count for the hardcover editions of Books 1-3 is 1,664. Children of Time is 608 pages; Children of Ruin is 576 pages; and Children of Memory is 480 pages. It’s possible that the new hardcover editions aren’t exactly the same as the originals, but the books appear to be roughly the same length and width, so the total page count should be somewhere around 1,700.
- Children of Time — $12 (
$20) - Children of Ruin — $13.66 (
$20) - Children of Memory — $12.89 (
$20)
More fiction by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Time isn’t Tchaikovsky’s only ongoing fantasy series. The fourth novel in the prolific British author’s dark fantasy series The Tyrant Philosophers will be published March 10, just one week before the fourth novel in Children of Time.
The Tyrant Philosophers
Prior to the release of Children of Time, Tchaikovsky was best known for his 10-book epic fantasy series Shadows of the Apt. Published from 2008-2014, the series includes the author’s debut novel Empire in Black and Gold.
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