The Aliens Among Us

[mtvessel]

Nov 2017
Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky – Pan Books, 2015 (kindle edition)
* * * *
I am pretty certain that the author has a pet tarantula; this is the second book of his to feature sentient arachnids, so he clearly has a thing for them. Unlike Spiderlight, however, this one is a science fiction thriller in the mould of A Fire Upon The Deep, with which it shares more than a passing similarity. And it's good, which makes Tchaikovsky one of the few authors who can challenge Zerothin's Law of Genre-hopping.

The setting is a recently terraformed world that is the location for an experiment in genetic uplift by an icy scientist called Avrana Kern. The final step is to release a colony of monkeys along with a nanovirus designed to accelerate the evolution of intelligence (Tchaikovsky cheekily acknowledges his plagiarism of the central idea of David Brin's Uplift novels by naming the research ship after him). A group of eco-terrorists called NUN infiltrate the experiment and sabotage it; the nanovirus makes it to the planet but the monkeys do not. Unaware of this, Kern seals herself in a command pod that is orbiting the planet and waits for her intelligent apes to make their appearance.

Meanwhile, the Gilgamesh, a generation spaceship, has escaped from the catastrophic war between NUN and the government that has ruined Earth. On it are Holsten Mason, a classicist, and his love interest Isa Lain, a (guess what) no-nonsense engineer. They become embroiled in more factionalism involving Guyen, the ship's autocratic commander, Karst, the security officer, and science officer Renas Vitas. As the ship approaches Kern's World, Holsten and Lain have to figure out why they are getting two signals - one from the armed and hostile Kern, who is determined that her experiment will not be ruined by human interference, and the other from the planet itself.

The reader knows that the second signal is the result of the nanovirus, which has found a different species to work on. Earth spiders introduced during the terraforming have developed a rapidly evolving civilisation taking advantage of their unique capabilities. This civilisation, seen though the many-facetted eyes of a female called Portia, is a brilliant creation, with its chemical signalling system and web-based constructions. It is easily the equal of the tines' world in A Fire upon the Deep and surpasses it in the visionary epic sweep of its evolutionary history.

Events on the human side of the story are, sadly, not as interesting, suffering as they do from cookie-cutter characterisation and space opera plotting that feels at odds with the careful and plausible spider-behaviour-based speculation of Portia's world. Only Holsten and Lain are properly developed and their on-again, off-again relationship doesn't really make much sense given the existential peril that they are in. Nor was I convinced by Avrana Kern, who is a tired stereotype of a heartless scientist taken to the max. Nonetheless, the human and spider elements of the story do eventually align in a satisfying way, and the fact that I wanted to spend more time in Portia's world and less in the Gilgamesh shows just how successful Tchaikovsky's attempt to get us to empathise with the aliens among us has been.

Comments

[ingaborg]

Note that the book is called "A Deepness in the Sky" not "A Darkness". And that's the book about intelligent arachnids. "A Fire Upon The Deep" is Vinge's book about the Tines.

[mtvessel]

Ah, thank you, you're quite right. I have fixed the text.

Weirdly, I haven't got round to "A Deepness in the Sky" - my subconscious must have made the link based on a review I read! I'd be interested to know how its treatment of sentient arachnids differs from this one.