Don’t tell them that I haven’t warned you about spoilers!
Ineffectual human protagonist and unlikeable characters galore (though the arachnids were great), this book is the best I have read this year so far. Definitely up there with Asimov’s & Herbert’s books – the ideas presented were so amazing that it actually made me giddy.
I had never read evolutionary sci-fi before, this book was a great introduction! The evolution of spiders into sentient and eventually space-faring beings through the cycles of progress and plague, of war and peace, of crusades and renaissance – though mimicking western history, were quite interesting from the arachnid point-of-view. How a self-delusional and bitter AI in a revolving satellite became a messiah to the self-aware spiders who spooled web & writhed in ecstasy every time it beamed down a bunch of mathematical equations – oh what fun! And the ants! Don’t get me started about them – the ant camera, the ant operating system, ant cloud computing and the ant AI network born as a result of that!
It was the section on the humans – floating around in space in an ark trying to find a habitable planet after the Earth has been destroyed by their ancestors’ stupidity – that was quite tepid and uninspiring. There is not a single likeable character in whose corner you can rally around. The protagonist is a blithering idiot, who sometimes gets to think amazing things (“It was a club. In that sense, it was quintessentially human thing: a tool to crush, to break, to lever apart in the prototypical way that humanity met the universe head-on.”), never to speak in front of others – and one who is always snapped at and undermined by everyone, even the woman who holds the torch for him and wants to carry his and his baby alone (metaphorically) across a millennium when she could choose just about anyone else whom she actually respects! In each chapter where humans feature – they fuck up badly. The things they do in this book are basically pointless and of no significance whatsoever except for showing up twice at a planet’s doorsteps, and getting their ass handed to them both times!
The highlight has to be the end section. Spiders in space, completely flummoxing the humans, oh my! It was just great.
Glad that I read this book!
Alienman 