Children of Time

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.

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.