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lightreadsChildren of Time and Children of Ruin
3/5. I had to look up the titles of these books because I've been calling them They're Good Spiders Brent, and Also They're Pretty Great Octopuses Brent.
Far future scifi about the tiny surviving remnant of humanity encountering the various spider/octopus space civilizations their forefathers created back when humanity had the technology to deploy an uplift virus. Charming, and surprised me with complexity in places I wasn't expecting it. I'd be all yes, yes, details of spider societal development and then the book would be like but also! Musings on interspecies communication and reaching across the void and remaking ourselves in a better image.
One thing I appreciated about these books is how little angst they have about what it means to be human. You know, am I still me if I've taken on a virus that changes how I interact with aliens? Am I still human if I'm a copy of a computer program ghosted from a copy of a personality taken from a woman while she died? I know I've said this before, but scifi in general has this obsession with angsting over that sort of thing, and I find it obnoxious at best, toxic at worst. It all springs from a narrow, restrictive idea of what human is supposed to be, and it's really easy to see how a lot of this is first cousin to disability anxiety. But anyway, in these books, people change, themselves and each other. Entire species rewrite themselves. And that's just what happens, warts and all.
3/5. I had to look up the titles of these books because I've been calling them They're Good Spiders Brent, and Also They're Pretty Great Octopuses Brent.
Far future scifi about the tiny surviving remnant of humanity encountering the various spider/octopus space civilizations their forefathers created back when humanity had the technology to deploy an uplift virus. Charming, and surprised me with complexity in places I wasn't expecting it. I'd be all yes, yes, details of spider societal development and then the book would be like but also! Musings on interspecies communication and reaching across the void and remaking ourselves in a better image.
One thing I appreciated about these books is how little angst they have about what it means to be human. You know, am I still me if I've taken on a virus that changes how I interact with aliens? Am I still human if I'm a copy of a computer program ghosted from a copy of a personality taken from a woman while she died? I know I've said this before, but scifi in general has this obsession with angsting over that sort of thing, and I find it obnoxious at best, toxic at worst. It all springs from a narrow, restrictive idea of what human is supposed to be, and it's really easy to see how a lot of this is first cousin to disability anxiety. But anyway, in these books, people change, themselves and each other. Entire species rewrite themselves. And that's just what happens, warts and all.