This book is more Star Trek than Star Trek. It embodies the ideals of infinite diversity in infinite combinations in a way that struck me to my heart. It stretches our minds to consider the most alien and for many people the most feared animals as having the capacity to be people, with just a little help. In all of his work, Adrian Tchaikovsky is a bull in the china shop of our delicate distinctions and artificial barriers between "thing" and "not thing".
The Book starts out with the human interstellar empire at its peak, and the greatest human scientist, Dr. Avrana Kern, is watching the disastrous end of an experiment to terraform a planet that is several light years away from earth, and try to recreate human evolution there.
Unknown to her, a catastrophe is about to befall the empire she knows, plunging humanity into the dark ages and relegating her experiment to mere legend.
After they are able to salvage a ship from the ruins of the old world, the last colony of humans are on their way to that same planet, seeking a place to set down roots and grow once more.
This sets up a scenario where you are watching an alien invasion from the point of view of the aliens (the human beings). I found myself, very much like Dr. Kern, rooting against that ship that represented the …
The Book starts out with the human interstellar empire at its peak, and the greatest human scientist, Dr. Avrana Kern, is watching the disastrous end of an experiment to terraform a planet that is several light years away from earth, and try to recreate human evolution there.
Unknown to her, a catastrophe is about to befall the empire she knows, plunging humanity into the dark ages and relegating her experiment to mere legend.
After they are able to salvage a ship from the ruins of the old world, the last colony of humans are on their way to that same planet, seeking a place to set down roots and grow once more.
This sets up a scenario where you are watching an alien invasion from the point of view of the aliens (the human beings). I found myself, very much like Dr. Kern, rooting against that ship that represented the last of our kind, hoping against hope that humanity goes extinct.
If you want a new point of view on evolution, intelligence, empathy and what it means to be human, Tchaikovsky's space epic is the book for you. I found myself wiping a few tears from my eyes at the climax of the book, and while it's not a page turner, it is a poignant, thoughtful story
For most of this book I didn't expect to continue with the rest of the series. I very much enjoyed the spider scenes and seeing their culture, values, and technology evolve over time, but I didn't much care for any of the human scenes until right at the end.
One aspect that I particularly liked is that, ironically, the spiders are effectively Humanist at the end while the humans take on the place of the un-evolved animals who think of the spiders in a predator/prey relationship. The spiders then turn the tables and uplift the humans in the same way (and using the same mechanism) that the humans originally uplifted their civilization (except by bootstrapping empathy instead of sentience). It brought the whole thing to a nice conclusion in a circular way and made me decide to try the second book as well.
Una storia di scienza e tecnologia da una prospettiva completamente inaspettata. Un ragionamento molto interessante sul linguaggio e sulla terraformazione.
