Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

He had a vertiginous sense that maybe he had, but that any such knowledge had fallen unnoticed from his head during the long, cold age of his suspension.

She has improved the lives of her species in a dozen separate ways, for she has a mind that can see answers to problems others did not even realize were holding them back. She is also a recluse, wanting little more than to get on with her experiments—a common trait for those driven to build on their inherited Understandings—which suits Portia’s peers well, as otherwise Bianca might decide that she was owed rather more of the group’s good fortune.

How many inventors had been relegated to historical obscurity because some later treasure-hunter had unearthed the older, superior method of achieving the same end?

Publicly, the Temple cannot condone such meddling, of course, but the spiders are a curious species, and those who are drawn to the Temple are the most curious of all. It was inevitable that the hothouse flower of heresy would end up nurtured by those very guardians of the orthodox.

She is beginning to drift into ever more speculative sciences, desperate for that one lateral thought that will save her civilization from a collapse into dispersed barbarism.

she has bartered her skills like a male, by serving lesser peer houses, and eventually forming a new peer group of her own, drawn from other disaffected scholars.