Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

for a moment Holsten was going to stop him, to ask him that impossible question that historians can never ask, regarding the things they study: What is it like to be you? A question nobody can step far enough out of their own frame of reference to answer.

Karst nodded grimly. “That bitch never liked us,” he pointed out. “No way she’d suddenly change her mind.” Several centuries later and a lot of spiders is a long way from “suddenly,” Holsten thought, but the words stayed unspoken in his head.

If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net—what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?