Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The scholars of Portia’s kind had been keen not to reprogram the ant colony, as they had done with its various limbs and expeditionary forces, because in doing so its unique abilities would be lost, and the spiders were not blind to the advances that the colony’s development had unlocked. So it was that years of complex campaigning had been entered into—at some considerable cost in lives—until the ant colony was manoeuvred into a position where cooperation with its spider neighbours became the most beneficial course of action, whereupon the ant colony passed, without acrimony or resentment, from an implacable foe to an obliging ally.

One of the many reasons why in this book the spiders are actually the heroes.

Who knows what we might have achieved, had we not been so keen to recreate all their follies, he thought now. Could we have saved the Earth? Would we be living there now on our own green planet?

“Promise me—” “Nothing,” she snapped instantly. “No promises. The universe promises us nothing; I extend the same to you. This is the human race, Holsten. It needs me.

You are Mine, but you also belong to the universe, and your purpose is whatever you choose. Your purpose is to survive and grow and prosper and to seek to understand, just as my people should have taken these things as their purpose, had they not fallen into foolishness, and perished.

Everything can be a tool. Everything is useful. They never did wipe out the Spitters, just as they never exterminated the ants themselves, a decision that later would become the basis of their burgeoning technology.

Faced with the arrival of humanity, the creator-species, the giants of legend, the spiders’ thought was not How can we destroy them? but How can we trap them? How can we use them? What is the barrier between us that makes them want to destroy us?

was to engineer the human infection to know its parents: to recognize the presence of itself in its arachnid creators, and call out to that similarity. Kinship at the sub-microbial level, so that one of the Gilgamesh’s great giants, the awesome, careless creator-gods of prehistory, might look upon Portia and her kin and know them as their children. Once