“It was practically a holy relic. / It was a club. In that sense, it was a quintessentially human thing: a tool to crush, to break, to lever apart in the prototypical way that humanity met the universe head-on. / ‘And how do they meet the world? What does the spider have as its basic tool?’ / Briefly, he entertained the thought, ‘They build.’”
AHHH just finished Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky and holy shit???? its gotta be up there with Project Hail Mary in my favorite first contact books list because… wow. the insane world building, the speculative evolution, the brain-uploading, the religion of fucking SPIDERS… i am obsessed
Holsten Mason (Child of Time by Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg)
Avrana Kern (Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky)
Voting ended onSep 10, 2024
Propaganda Under the Cut:
Holsten:
Mason spends centuries in deep stasis, waking up periodically to meet with other ship officers. However, since he's kind of the least important of the officers, he keeps waking up to an increasingly insane history developing around him that he wasn't clued in on ahead of time - then being sent back to sleep. It's awesome.
Avrana:
Kern is the last survivor of a fallen empire, questionably human in every sense of the word, clinging to life through cold sleep technology, scientific integrity and pure, unadulterated spite. She's torn from oblivion in the space between the silence and faced with a universe she no longer recognises. Trapped in a coffin of circuitry and steel with no one to talk to but her broken reflection, she cannibalises her own mind into a simulacrum of a simulacrum, her sympathies shifting from the fractured remnant of humanity to their mutated arthropod kin on the planet below. Not even she knows what's down there. She was never supposed to dream.
later on she is hit by a laser and uploaded to ants and it is honestly the coolest shit ever
