In book two of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy (I've reviewed book one here), our once-competing spider and human civilizations have now teamed up to explore the universe together. We also meet a separate tiny outpost of humans attempting to establish new planetary colonies (readers should avoid emotional investment into any these human pseudoprotagonists however: the author kills them off). And we also meet an oddly interesting uberoctopus civilization, descended from experiments of one of the outpost humans. The octopus civilization offers a sort of neomalthusian lesson as it experiences massive overpopulation, mass violence, environmental collapse--even mass cannibalism.
Finally, there's a still weirder species, and the author struggles a bit in portraying it: a sort of cellular "goo collective" that starts out literally colonizing the minds and bodies of the humans and octopi. Later, by a rather sudden and implausible plot event, the goo befriends all the other species and joins them on an interstellar journey.
I more or less gave away the ending right there.
A central theme of this novel is communication across barriers: cultural, civilizational and biological. How would humans possibly communicate with spiders who can't even hear human speech, but rather "speak" via palp-waving, stepping and posturing? And if that communication gap isn't enough, what happens when you try to reach across the mental chasm between you and the octopus species, who communicate by body color and tentacle graspings? It makes you think twice about the communication barriers we needlessly place between ourselves.
This complicated story jumps from time period to time period, requiring periodic reminders and backstory to fill in gaps for the reader. Characters die off, thousands of years pass, wars erupt between and within species... and then the author closes down the story rather arbitrarily, with an abrupt peace, love and understanding arranged for all. This is a competent novel, but less readable and less immersive than its predecessor. We'll see how the author handles book three in a future review.
To Read:
Peter Godfrey-Smith: Other Minds [a book about octopus intelligence that the author cites in the acknowledgments]
Vocab (I thank this author for yet again offering quite a collection of new words):
cnidarian: an aquatic invertebrate animal of the phylum Cnidaria, which comprises the coelenterates
sessile: fixed in one place; immobile (of an organism, e.g. a barnacle)
parthenogenesis: a reproductive strategy that involves development of a female (rarely a male) gamete without fertilization; occurs commonly among lower plants and invertebrate animals (particularly rotifers, aphids, ants, wasps, and bees)
bauplan: generalized structural body plan; the generalized structural body plan that characterizes a group of organisms and especially a major taxon (such as a phylum)
flense: to slice the skin or fat from (a carcass, especially that of a whale); to strip (skin or fat) from a carcass; "the skin had been flensed off"
haruspex: one who performs haruspicy or divination by entrails
urticating: causing a stinging or prickling sensation like that given by a nettle
chelicerae: the pair of appendages in front of the mouth in arachnids and some other arthropods, usually modified as pincer-like claws