Children of Time
Initially, this looked like a Brin rip-off, or a Vinge rip-off, or even a Pratchett rip-off. And the prose is just serviceable. Title sucks too.
But it blooms: the long evolutionary pathway it follows - from a spider jeeust 'thinking' that pack hunting might be a good idea, to a full manned space program - is excellent. The alternative technological route is the great bit - what would industry look like without fossil fuel, a mechanised society without metal? - and the protagonist spiders who find the route are easy to empathise with.
Ants are used as robots, factories, laboratories, and eventually as CPUs:
{over-literal bull-shit}
(Tchaikovsky overstates massively the potential of ants as a processing channel, though - witness the giant leap in practicality from ~1cm mechanical relays to (even the crappiest) fully-electronic vacuum-tube. Nothing so slow and large as an ant colony could carry out much logic-gate work without taking much longer than a human-level worker and anyway accumulating huge errors.)
\{/over-literal bull-shit}
(Their bioengineering stuff is actually more realistic than Vinge's spiders' breakneck 50-year sprint through the C20th and C21st centuries, even if you include the Uplifting virus. This is because Vinge's telling is deterministic - they discover all the same stuff as us, in mostly the same order - and their culture a cartoon of ours.)
His other successful theme is incomprehension: females not understanding male liberation, spiders not understanding how a depressed solitary human could be sentient, Kern not understanding anything. (Mostly the spider gender politics are boring, just bizarro patriarchy with a cannibal twist.)
The main antagonist, the mad hubristic scientist starts off dull and strawish (why did it take 300 years for her to ask what rough genus the spiders were?) but the moment she stops that stuff and reaches across the species barrier is quite beautiful.
Also, Tchaikovsky often drops out of the Spiders' worldview mid-sentence to telegraph what you, a human, should be thinking of all this (an example is the use of "curious" in the passage above).
The humans are less interesting, fairly stock generation-shippers. There is this inversion, that the scholar of dead languages is Key Crew, plot-critical all the time:
Anyway worthwhile, momentarily dazzling.
***
How does it do as Serious science fiction?
Social development: Lots. The spiders' matriarchal anarchism is shown with realistic downsides. The ark ship humans go through several revolutions and regressions.
Software development: Some, but all pretty high-level. Thousands of years of uptime for some systems, with only hints at how to keep it going. Some nice linguistic archaeology.
Actual Science: Mostly evo bio, little bit of computer science and crypto maybe.
But it blooms: the long evolutionary pathway it follows - from a spider jeeust 'thinking' that pack hunting might be a good idea, to a full manned space program - is excellent. The alternative technological route is the great bit - what would industry look like without fossil fuel, a mechanised society without metal? - and the protagonist spiders who find the route are easy to empathise with.
Ants are used as robots, factories, laboratories, and eventually as CPUs:
There are hundreds of tamed ant colonies within Great Nest, not counting those in the surrounds that undertake the day-to-day business of producing food, clearing ground or fending off incursions of wild species. Each colony has been carefully trained, by subtle manipulation of punishment, reward and chemical stimulus, to perform a specific service, giving the great minds access to a curious kind of difference engine.
{over-literal bull-shit}
(Tchaikovsky overstates massively the potential of ants as a processing channel, though - witness the giant leap in practicality from ~1cm mechanical relays to (even the crappiest) fully-electronic vacuum-tube. Nothing so slow and large as an ant colony could carry out much logic-gate work without taking much longer than a human-level worker and anyway accumulating huge errors.)
\{/over-literal bull-shit}
(Their bioengineering stuff is actually more realistic than Vinge's spiders' breakneck 50-year sprint through the C20th and C21st centuries, even if you include the Uplifting virus. This is because Vinge's telling is deterministic - they discover all the same stuff as us, in mostly the same order - and their culture a cartoon of ours.)
His other successful theme is incomprehension: females not understanding male liberation, spiders not understanding how a depressed solitary human could be sentient, Kern not understanding anything. (Mostly the spider gender politics are boring, just bizarro patriarchy with a cannibal twist.)
The main antagonist, the mad hubristic scientist starts off dull and strawish (why did it take 300 years for her to ask what rough genus the spiders were?) but the moment she stops that stuff and reaches across the species barrier is quite beautiful.
Also, Tchaikovsky often drops out of the Spiders' worldview mid-sentence to telegraph what you, a human, should be thinking of all this (an example is the use of "curious" in the passage above).
The humans are less interesting, fairly stock generation-shippers. There is this inversion, that the scholar of dead languages is Key Crew, plot-critical all the time:
To study and laud those antique psychopaths during the Earth's last toxic days had seemed bad taste. Nobody liked a classicist.
Anyway worthwhile, momentarily dazzling.
***
How does it do as Serious science fiction?
Social development: Lots. The spiders' matriarchal anarchism is shown with realistic downsides. The ark ship humans go through several revolutions and regressions.
Software development: Some, but all pretty high-level. Thousands of years of uptime for some systems, with only hints at how to keep it going. Some nice linguistic archaeology.
Actual Science: Mostly evo bio, little bit of computer science and crypto maybe.