Children of Time
The Children of Time series, Book 1
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: One one blue world in an insignificant star system, millions of years of evolution and chance produced a prodigal, if destructive, species from nondescript ancestors. Now, Homo sapiens reaches out to the stars to repeat the process, only on their own terms. On terraformed planets seeded with Earth wildlife, an artificial nanovirus will, in theory at least, compress the ageless trial-and-error that created self-aware and technologically advanced humans into a few thousand years, uplifting a lucky population of primates to join humanity in exploring the vast and, thus far, empty void of space. Doctor Avrana Kern stands poised above one such world, about to trigger the process... but she has ignored the threat that has, for so long, held her kind back. She has ignored the discontent and desperation back home, the ideological schisms, and the increasingly violent calls to curb humanity's reach and ambition. Right on the very brink of her ultimate success, saboteurs destroy everything... everything except Kern, escaping into an orbital satellite with a hibernation chamber, and the nanovirus itself. But what can it possibly hope to do, on a planet without even the most basal primate to act upon? In the nature of life since the dawn of time, it will have to adapt - and it will do so in a way nobody could have possibly expected, when it discovers the vast, untapped potential waiting within invertebrate minds, particularly the species Portia labiata, known on Earth as jumping spiders.
Thousands of years later, the ark ship Gilgamesh has set out from a dying Earth with a remnant population of humans, one of a handful of hail-Mary passes into the unknown following old star charts salvaged from what came to be known as the Old Empire. Records of those days are sketchy, the ancients elevated to near-divine (or -diabolical) status in common culture, but provide the only hope for a future of the species. At last, they arrive at a green world - a world guarded by a satellite governed by a half-mad artificial intelligence. Nobody has heard from the other ark ships since departing Earth, and this planet - despite the angry satellite ghost of Kern and the bizarre monsters that appear to infest it - might be the only possible home for the displaced former masters of Earth. One thing humans have always been good at is species extermination and selfish survival... but they've never encountered an intelligence like the one waiting for them on Kern's World.
REVIEW: This is not the first tale to speculate on "uplifted" animals, but among the few (that I've encountered, at least) to extend that speculation to spiders, whose minds are surprisingly sophisticated and utterly alien to even mammalian thinking, let alone humans. Not being a huge fan of spiders myself (though jumping spiders never creeped me out like the web-spinners and wolf spiders), I was a bit iffy on this, but Tchaikovsky's spiders won me over, balancing a fine line between inhuman perspectives - their civilization, their strengths and weaknesses and cultural blind spots, come from somewhere between solid research and speculation - and necessary anthropomorphization for the sake of the human readers. By exploiting their natural abilities and those of the nanovirus that created them, they arrive at civilization by entirely different avenues than those taken by the species responsible for uplifting them, if not without their own setbacks and problems. The human cast, meanwhile, skips through their centuries thanks to suspended animation, with the primary point-of-view character, "classicist" Holsten Mason (an expert in "classic" Old Empire languages and history), being mostly a passive observer, often annoyingly so. He watches, through generations, as humans persistently echo the same strengths and weaknesses that led to both the rise of the Old Empire and its collapse (and Earth's eventual doom), tilting toward the latter as the stakes become more desperate. The common human fear of and revulsion for spiders kicks things up to a higher degree, even as the spiders struggle to grasp what little they see and learn of humans and their incomprehensible ways. It is inevitable that the two civilizations, one on the rise and one in decline, will clash, both desperate for the one thing they can both agree is top priority: their own survival. It wanders now and again, particularly on the Gilgamesh (I really got annoyed by Mason's lack of anything resembling a vertebral column; the spiders had ten times more backbone even without internal skeletons), and something about the end felt a little rushed, but overall I enjoyed the journey; I never expected to find myself rooting for spiders...
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