Children of Time
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Children of Time
| Author | Adrian Tchaikovsky |
|---|---|
| Published | 2015 |
| Pages | 616 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | A terraforming virus meant to uplift monkeys gets into spiders instead, and the book alternates between generations of those spiders building tools, astronomy and planet-scale coordination and the crew of a human ark ship fleeing a civilisation that has already collapsed once. Tchaikovsky is a zoologist, so the alien intelligence is worked out from the biology — a book about how a distributed intelligence bootstraps coordination from nothing; it won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award. |
Children of Time
Where I heard about it
- The a16z infrastructure team — on the a16z Infra Reading List, B tier (“also worth reading”), volume one of the Children of Time entry, which they describe as terrifying in its conceit and optimistic in its ending.
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.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.