A race for survival among the stars... Humanity's last survivors escaped earth's ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers?
WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?
The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age—a world terraformed and prepared for human life.
But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.
Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of …
A race for survival among the stars... Humanity's last survivors escaped earth's ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers?
WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?
The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age—a world terraformed and prepared for human life.
But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.
Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?
It's been way too long since I have had a novel grab me from the very first chapter. The plot spins out from a premise that never seems completely outlandish, where humans in suspension pods try to reestablish on a distant terraformed earth. The plot is somewhat like Battlestar Galactica, except there's only one Cylon and Earth is full of deadly arthropods.
The book is brilliantly structured, alternating between a human and a non-human protagonist. Spoiler: man was the true monster all along.
Spiders undergo enhanced evolution, building an extraordinary new civilisation. Meanwhile the last of humanity searches for a new home, bringing its destructive tendencies with it. Impressive & audacious vision, but lacks engaging characters.
Amazing, depressing and uplifting at the same time
5 stars
Great book, a take on a thought experiment for intelligent life that doesn't take anthropological shortcuts and a humanity that isn't able to learn from mistakes
Amazing, depressing and uplifting at the same time
5 stars
Great book, a take on a thought experiment for intelligent life that doesn't take anthropological shortcuts and a humanity that isn't able to learn from mistakes
TThis book is good for so many reasons, it manages to deliver very interesting ideas but always feels grounded in the characters. It has the most interesting imagining of non-human intelligence I've seen.
What a wild ride! People… Spiders… Ants… Beetles… Crazy computers… All combined to make a wild story. Various philosophies on humanity are pointed out subtly, and really, spiders win in that sense…
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.
Frustratingly well executed but somewhat irritating. Tchaikovsky weaves two tales together, one about a post-apocalyptic ark ship that outlives its expected lifetime and another about a civilization of spiders infected with a magic virus that makes them evolve quickly and be more empathetic. All of this is interesting, well structured, makes good use of contrast and variation on themes, is everything you could expect of modern sci-fi. My complaints are a bunch of annoyances that take the shine off the whole thing. Chief among them is the main human PoV character who is a humanities professor surrounded by STEM and executive types who blunders his way from one catastrophe to another apparently knowing better than the rest of the cast but doing precious little with his wisdom over the course of Portal millennia. The human cast are a bunch of bad stereotypes and you could have cut half that half …
Frustratingly well executed but somewhat irritating. Tchaikovsky weaves two tales together, one about a post-apocalyptic ark ship that outlives its expected lifetime and another about a civilization of spiders infected with a magic virus that makes them evolve quickly and be more empathetic. All of this is interesting, well structured, makes good use of contrast and variation on themes, is everything you could expect of modern sci-fi. My complaints are a bunch of annoyances that take the shine off the whole thing. Chief among them is the main human PoV character who is a humanities professor surrounded by STEM and executive types who blunders his way from one catastrophe to another apparently knowing better than the rest of the cast but doing precious little with his wisdom over the course of Portal millennia. The human cast are a bunch of bad stereotypes and you could have cut half that half of the book and had something far less frustrating. The spider's history is far more compelling but beyond a few analogies for (mostly Western European) history I didn't really feel like the cultural or political implications of the society he outlines were explored at any depth. I don't mind the conclusion but there is no real questioning of whether the use of the nanovirus could be immoral or misused. Reducing your crisis between two civilisations to a straw man philosophical model between two parties then resolving it with a macguffin seems like it cheapens your narrative and the philosophy you were shoe horning in there. I can see why this is well regarded, there is a lot that's good in here, and if you like a more classical style of science fiction this may tickle your fancy, but I don't feel it's quite as clever as it wants to seem. It's also hard to avoid the takeaway being that maybe eugenics would be good.
I tried, I really did. It had some interesting concepts but I felt it's pacing was all wrong from the kind of story it was trying to tell and as such became a chore to read.
Una storia di scienza e tecnologia da una prospettiva completamente inaspettata. Un ragionamento molto interessante sul linguaggio e sulla terraformazione.