Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky

4 ideas

1. Nanovirus uplifts spiders instead of monkeys

   Terraformer Avrana Kern seeds a green planet with monkeys and an uplift nanovirus, but an insurrection destroys the monkey payload and the virus instead infects Portia jumping spiders, whose civilisation then evolves over thousands of years under the distant watch of Kern, uploaded into a satellite. Meanwhile the last humans, on the ark ship Gilgamesh, arrive to claim the planet and fall into mutiny, cult and war, while the spiders progress. The ending turns on the spiders rewriting the virus to give the humans empathy, so the two species can coexist rather than one exterminating the other.

2. Cognition shaped by body and senses

   An intelligence evolved from a vibration-sensing, eight-legged predator builds a civilisation on silk, chemical signalling and web-based communication instead of fire, metal and sound. The substrate of a mind (its senses, anatomy and ecological niche) determines which technologies, metaphors and social forms it finds natural. Alien minds are therefore different in structure, not humans in costume.

3. Understanding transmitted as heritable memory

   The virus lets the spiders pass learned knowledge to offspring as inherited 'Understandings', so each generation starts with its ancestors' discoveries instead of relearning them. Because knowledge accumulates through biology rather than only through teaching, cultural progress speeds up greatly. Whoever controls what gets encoded then gains enormous social power.

4. Spiders learn coexistence; humans repeat old violence

   Across their crises the spiders increasingly choose to incorporate rather than annihilate others, from co-opting the ants to finally rewriting the virus so humans and spiders can coexist. The humans arrive with advanced technology but reproduce the factionalism and violence that ended Earth. The novel sets these two trajectories against each other, suggesting that a civilisation's capacity to accommodate other minds matters as much as its tools.

Save and mark ideas in the app