Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
In his 2015 Arthur C Clarke Award winning novel, Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky incorporated several common science fiction tropes. While there were the almost ubiquitous interstellar flight, suspended animation and artificial intelligence; it was the slightly less used ones of species uplift and terra-forming that powered the plot. That plot, in brief, was that a terra-forming project goes pear-shaped and instead of simian accelerated evolution there is an arachnid one. There follows, making up the meat of this story, a historical account of their development, free of human interference. Giant intelligent jumping spiders; who could ask for more?
In his follow-on novel, apparently very few sci-fi and fantasy authors can resist the lure of sequels, Children of Ruin, Tchaikovsky expands on this theme. The story goes back and forth in time, from another ill-fated terra-forming expedition to a joint spider and human mission to locate humanity’s survivors. A post-apocalyptic situation, a sci-fi trope I neglected to include in the previous list.
The plot enlargement in this story involves the up-lift of another species, octopuses (you say octopi, I say octopuses…) in this instance, and an alien race. This expansion creates both opportunities and difficulties for the author. It allows Tchaikovsky to explore further his interests in semiotics and what defines intelligence. The difficulty is that there is almost too much going on here. The concurrent plot lines, inter-species communication, human machine integration, human over-reach and resulting hubris, all jostle for our attention.
The great strength of Children of Time lay in the plot’s focus on the development of a spider consciousness and culture. This was done skilfully enough for the reader to overlook the inherent, and inevitable, anthropomorphism. Doing the same for a world of octopuses doesn’t quite come off as satisfactorily, in large part due to its being just one strand of this story. The other problem lies with the alien intelligence. Tchaikovsky makes a great start with the flora and fauna of another world befuddling and confounding its human observers. This, unfortunately, gets undercut when the alien consciousness proves to be all too human-like in its motivations and actions. Its parasitic ability to turn humans in to meat puppets is a sci-fi/horror device that’s been done nearly to death.
The preceding criticisms may give the erroneous impression that I’m struggling with this novel. It’s more a feeling, upon reflection, the editorial application of ‘less is more’ would have made this a much better read. Adrian Tchaikovsky is certainly a good enough writer to keep the reader engaged with the action adventure aspects of the story, as well as musing on its more thought-provoking philosophic themes.
Further Reading
The transformation of animals into sapient beings in science fiction stretches back to H G Well’s The Island of Dr Moreau, 1896. Lots of authors have played around with variations on this theme; Daniel Keyes with Flowers for Algernon, 1959, Pierre Boule with Planet of the Apes, 1963 and Margaret Atwood in her MaddAddam series, 2003-13, are some notable ones.
David Brin’s Uplift Universe series, 1980 onwards, has defined the sub-genre.
Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligence, 2016 by Peter Godfrey-Smith is given acknowledgement by Tchaikovsky as the source for much of background involved with that aspect of his book.
On terra-forming; Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky, 1950, Arthur C Clarke’s The Sands of Mars, 1951, Isaac Asimoz’s The Martian Way, 1952, Poul Anderson’s The Big Rain, 1954 and The Snows of Ganymede, 1958, Roger Zelany’s Isle of the Dead, 1969 and Frederik Pohl’s Mining the Oort 1992.
Like with Brin on uplift, Kin Stanley Robinson, Mars Trilogy series, 1992-99, is now pretty much the author that immediately comes to mind on the subject of terra-forming.