Reading does a body good. Open your mind to a vast universe of possibilities with some of my favorite books.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The world has ended, as it so often does in sci-fi books, and a small group of people have escaped the apocalypse with the singular goal of searching the universe for a new planet upon which they can rebuild their civilization. The trip takes millennia of course, but they finally arrive at a planet suitable for human survival.
The space pioneers are unaware that the planet is the ancient site of a scientific experiment gone terribly wrong. The planet was terraformed and seeded for a group of monkeys to inhabit. These monkeys were to be infected with a nano-virus designed to speed up intelligence gained through evolution so traits that normally take hundreds of thousands of years to develop can occur in a single generation. The virus made it down to the planet as intended, but the monkeys burned up in orbit along with the people overseeing the experiment.
All this happened long before the people left Earth in search of a new world to call home. In that time, the virus took hold in a population of spiders. Mr. Tchaikovsky walks through their evolutionary journey from mere insect to global dominance and beyond. It is really fun to see the differences between how their technology evolves and progresses compared to the technology of the human race. Conflict is inevitable when the humans finally make it to the planet. That much is certain, but who will rise to become the dominant species?
Children of Time has everything you want in a science fiction novel. Even people who hate spiders love this book because of Adrian’s mastery of storytelling and character development. I definitely recommend this book to any sci-fi reader.
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