book: The Children of Time , Adrian Tchaikovsky
a brilliantly thought-out piece ruminating on sentience in non-humanoid organisms. How would a creature with different senses and a different body plan organise their society?
The pitch I was given was spoiler-free (it doesn't even scratch the surface of the actual goings-on of the book) so I'll paraphrase it here. Tchaikovsky describes a future humanity that seeks to create new humans out of force-evolving apes, so that the spacefaring human empire can act as gods to these naive human-2.0s. An incident occurs, and instead of spurring apes down the path of human-esque society... the spur-along spiders. Specifically, Portia labiata spiders, delightfully mustachioed little things.
( above: Portia labiata , from sunnyjosef on wikimedia )
millenia later, the ancestors of the space-empire humans are on a collision course with the spider planet, with no idea what awaits them there.
apart from the well-informed meditations on umwelten and the physiological-cultural relationship, Tchaikovsky does a great job lampooning arachnophobia and vertebrate-chauvinism (or "phylumism" as I have also seen). So much of the story is propelled by assumptions around invertebrate incapability, simplicity, meat-robot-likeness. it's refreshing to see spiders portrayed so sympathetically, and to see irrational hatred (or at least disregard) invertebrate brethren be criticised.
this book is part of a series, of which a fourth book is rumoured to be coming-out-soon...!
...
thanks for reading!🪱🦀
Atom feed ; RSS feed
check out my reading list and sign my guestbook (external link!) while you're here :)