Children of Time

A terraforming project seeded a planet with a virus meant to uplift monkeys; the monkeys died and the virus got into the spiders instead. The book alternates between generations of those spiders building tools, astronomy and planet-scale coordination, and the crew of a human ark ship arriving from a civilisation that has already collapsed once. Tchaikovsky is a zoologist, and the alien intelligence is genuinely worked out from the biology rather than being humans with extra legs.

Context: B tier, “also worth reading,” volume one of the Children of Time entry — the volume a16z actually describe, calling the conceit terrifying and the ending optimistic. It won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The reason it lands on an infrastructure list: it is a book about how a distributed intelligence bootstraps coordination protocols from nothing.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Adrian Tchaikovsky — the author, a zoologist by training.
• Children of Ruin · Children of Memory — volumes two and three.
• Evolution — the mechanism the book runs on.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.