I forgot that I'd discovered "Dragon's Egg" when ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
isis was reading "Children of Time" a year and a half ago and compared it to that one. I was intrigued and picked it up shortly after. Sure enough, reading this definitely reminded me of "Dragon's Egg," so...full circle. :p
The parallels between the two come from the writing style in the alien parts. In "Dragon's Egg," the alien species is a fictional entity called the "cheela," who live on the surface of a high-gravity neutron star; in "Children of Time," they're giant spiders, descendants of Earth spiders in an abandoned terraforming project. The alien sections focus in on individual aliens for a couple chapters, then timeskip many generations down the line, so we get glimpses of an entire technological civilization evolving over time. And the POV is a very distant third-person, not quite omniscient. It's "infodumpy," but not as a pejorative, because it's not ham-fisted into dialogue or exposition; rather, it's so alien that the only way to get across what's happening is to summarize in a more non-fictional style. In the early generations, when the spiders are basically the same as Earth spiders, there's no real language, so not much room for dialogue, but as spider society advances, it becomes more of a traditional narrative. In "Dragon's Egg," all the character names are unique; in "Children of Time," the main characters' names repeat every generation.
"Dragon's Egg" was kind of weird in that even though the cheela have no relation to Earth life, their sexual "recreational" habits felt somewhat unoriginal and sexist. In contrast, Earth spiders actually do have sexual dimorphism and ensuing cannibalism, which casts a long shadow over the developing spider civilization, and leads to some droll humor. "Eventually he is promoted from prey/not-prey to mate, because her behaviours are limited as regards males. After the act of mating, other instincts surface and their partnership comes to an end." Over 400 pages later, this pays off in a surprisingly affecting portrayal of the first spider astronauts. Points for Tchaikovsky.
"A strange thing that she, whose work places her at the very fang-point of scientific advance, feels that life is outstripping her, actually leaving her behind." I enjoyed turns of phrase like "fang-point" and the spiders' metaphors of perceiving everything in terms of "webs"--the more of this alien POV, the better! Or encoding images:
This should go without saying, but if you're extremely arachnophobic, probably an anti-rec. One thing I had not osmosed is that there are also oversized ant warriors, and like, I'm more phobic of ants than I am of spiders, so :S I was mostly able to do a mental find/replace and read "weird aliens" for "spiders" and "ants," which maybe defeated the purpose, but oh well, I'm a wimp. The scenes where humans interacted with ants were pretty disturbing, though.
Okay, so that's the mostly good-ish stuff. In "Dragon's Egg," there were also interspersing human chapters. Because the timescale on a neutron star is so fast, what equates to a couple weeks or months in human time is an enormous timespan, evolutionary speaking, for the cheela. But in "Children of Time," while spider lifespans may be somewhat shorter than humans', they're not many-orders-of-magnitude different. Instead, the timeskips in spider time correspond to human refugees from Earth jumping into and out of cryosleep while they try to find an inhabitable world. The main human POV character is Holsten Mason, a classicist who's the spaceship expert on the extinct languages of the "Old Empire" who ruined Earth and didn't get very far on the terraforming either. And the times when he's pulled out of cryosleep correspond to times when humanity is kind of in crisis (and/or having a very awkward romantic relationship). It is definitely sending the message of "Homo sapiens are basically garbage and even when the stakes are high, our petty shortsightedness gets in the way and ruins everything."
The spiders, because of their planet's prehistory as a terraforming project, have a "Messenger" in the sky that communicates with them (not always successfully) in bits. The worldbuilding here about "how would such an entity influence the planet, in terms of religion, and science, and some of each," was fun. But it bordered on glib--like, "here are the Good Rational people who follow Actual Evidence, as opposed to those Bad Believers who are crazy." Similarly with the human "cult leader"--like, the same guy is described as "always four moves ahead" by somone who doesn't even particularly like him. Do we really have enough information to judge his plans?
Unlike the story linked in the previous post, there are no noble lies here, and no fundamental thematic contradictions. To the extent that there are "winners" in the "game" of evolution (here played with both a Darwinian and a Lamarckian ruleset), they aren't humans or spiders but A Secret Third Thing. All the same, the cynical undercurrents are frustrating. Fortunately, the worldbuilding is fun on its own.
Bingo: First in a Series, Multi-POV (unless you treat all the "Portias" as being the same person :P), Space Opera, Survival, former Readalong.
isis was reading "Children of Time" a year and a half ago and compared it to that one. I was intrigued and picked it up shortly after. Sure enough, reading this definitely reminded me of "Dragon's Egg," so...full circle. :pThe parallels between the two come from the writing style in the alien parts. In "Dragon's Egg," the alien species is a fictional entity called the "cheela," who live on the surface of a high-gravity neutron star; in "Children of Time," they're giant spiders, descendants of Earth spiders in an abandoned terraforming project. The alien sections focus in on individual aliens for a couple chapters, then timeskip many generations down the line, so we get glimpses of an entire technological civilization evolving over time. And the POV is a very distant third-person, not quite omniscient. It's "infodumpy," but not as a pejorative, because it's not ham-fisted into dialogue or exposition; rather, it's so alien that the only way to get across what's happening is to summarize in a more non-fictional style. In the early generations, when the spiders are basically the same as Earth spiders, there's no real language, so not much room for dialogue, but as spider society advances, it becomes more of a traditional narrative. In "Dragon's Egg," all the character names are unique; in "Children of Time," the main characters' names repeat every generation.
"Dragon's Egg" was kind of weird in that even though the cheela have no relation to Earth life, their sexual "recreational" habits felt somewhat unoriginal and sexist. In contrast, Earth spiders actually do have sexual dimorphism and ensuing cannibalism, which casts a long shadow over the developing spider civilization, and leads to some droll humor. "Eventually he is promoted from prey/not-prey to mate, because her behaviours are limited as regards males. After the act of mating, other instincts surface and their partnership comes to an end." Over 400 pages later, this pays off in a surprisingly affecting portrayal of the first spider astronauts. Points for Tchaikovsky.
"A strange thing that she, whose work places her at the very fang-point of scientific advance, feels that life is outstripping her, actually leaving her behind." I enjoyed turns of phrase like "fang-point" and the spiders' metaphors of perceiving everything in terms of "webs"--the more of this alien POV, the better! Or encoding images:
The code is simple: a sequence of dark and light dots, spiraling outwards from a central point, that together build up into a wider picture. It is as universal a system as Bianca can conceive of...
sending out formulae to describe the spiral that is the blindingly obvious way the image should be read.
(The joke being that humans' attempt to send an image to extraterrestrials defaulted to "rectangular raster scan, product of two primes," because of course the only way to see an image is rectangular.) In contrast, when the narrator mentioned things like the spiders' Thermopylae, or a spider character used words like "tenfold"/"hundredfold"/'thousandfold" (no base eight??) I was a little disappointed.sending out formulae to describe the spiral that is the blindingly obvious way the image should be read.
This should go without saying, but if you're extremely arachnophobic, probably an anti-rec. One thing I had not osmosed is that there are also oversized ant warriors, and like, I'm more phobic of ants than I am of spiders, so :S I was mostly able to do a mental find/replace and read "weird aliens" for "spiders" and "ants," which maybe defeated the purpose, but oh well, I'm a wimp. The scenes where humans interacted with ants were pretty disturbing, though.
Okay, so that's the mostly good-ish stuff. In "Dragon's Egg," there were also interspersing human chapters. Because the timescale on a neutron star is so fast, what equates to a couple weeks or months in human time is an enormous timespan, evolutionary speaking, for the cheela. But in "Children of Time," while spider lifespans may be somewhat shorter than humans', they're not many-orders-of-magnitude different. Instead, the timeskips in spider time correspond to human refugees from Earth jumping into and out of cryosleep while they try to find an inhabitable world. The main human POV character is Holsten Mason, a classicist who's the spaceship expert on the extinct languages of the "Old Empire" who ruined Earth and didn't get very far on the terraforming either. And the times when he's pulled out of cryosleep correspond to times when humanity is kind of in crisis (and/or having a very awkward romantic relationship). It is definitely sending the message of "Homo sapiens are basically garbage and even when the stakes are high, our petty shortsightedness gets in the way and ruins everything."
It had been too much. He, who had translated the madness of a millennia-old guardian angel. He who had been abducted. He who had seen an alien world crawling with earthly horrors. He had feared. He had loved. He had met a man who wanted to be God. He had seen death.
It had been a rough few weeks. The universe had been given centuries to absorb the shock, but not him. He had been woken and pounded, woken and pounded, and the rigid stasis of suspension offered him no capacity to recover his balance.
Is that fair? There were a lot of other characters I wanted to hear from; humans born on an experimental moon base, or on the spaceship in the service of a quasi-cultish leader, or on the spaceship in the service of a rational and good engineer. Surely, many of them were able to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, with the mindset of "the future of sapient life in the galaxy very likely depends on my comrades and I suceeding here"! Getting their POV might have undermined Mason's cynicism.It had been a rough few weeks. The universe had been given centuries to absorb the shock, but not him. He had been woken and pounded, woken and pounded, and the rigid stasis of suspension offered him no capacity to recover his balance.
The spiders, because of their planet's prehistory as a terraforming project, have a "Messenger" in the sky that communicates with them (not always successfully) in bits. The worldbuilding here about "how would such an entity influence the planet, in terms of religion, and science, and some of each," was fun. But it bordered on glib--like, "here are the Good Rational people who follow Actual Evidence, as opposed to those Bad Believers who are crazy." Similarly with the human "cult leader"--like, the same guy is described as "always four moves ahead" by somone who doesn't even particularly like him. Do we really have enough information to judge his plans?
...those squabbling ape-things of the Gilgamesh will return eventually and make an end of it all in that mindless way that humans have always done. Monkeys or spiders, it will not matter to them. And she, Avrana Kern, forgotten genius of an elder age, will slowly decay into senescence and obsolescence, orbiting a world given over to the thriving hives of what she must nominally allow to be her own species.
Her long history will be done. This last corner of her time and her people will be overwritten with the fecund hosts of her distant and undeserving descendants. All of it will be lost, and there will be no record of her long and lonely aeons of waiting and listening, of her breakthroughs and her triumphs and her eventual horrifying discovery.
The wording of "elder age" brought to mind Tchaikovsky's "Elder Race," in which Nyr--who is acclaimed as an ancient wizard by others--has to get across that actually, no, he's just a human like them. Except, for all the faults and imperfections of the society Nyr was born into, he's basically a decent person. And so are Lynesse and her peers, who are definitely 100% human. What's the difference?Her long history will be done. This last corner of her time and her people will be overwritten with the fecund hosts of her distant and undeserving descendants. All of it will be lost, and there will be no record of her long and lonely aeons of waiting and listening, of her breakthroughs and her triumphs and her eventual horrifying discovery.
Unlike the story linked in the previous post, there are no noble lies here, and no fundamental thematic contradictions. To the extent that there are "winners" in the "game" of evolution (here played with both a Darwinian and a Lamarckian ruleset), they aren't humans or spiders but A Secret Third Thing. All the same, the cynical undercurrents are frustrating. Fortunately, the worldbuilding is fun on its own.
Bingo: First in a Series, Multi-POV (unless you treat all the "Portias" as being the same person :P), Space Opera, Survival, former Readalong.
