#i cant remember why he thought throwing 250 packages of human dna away was a good idea

[theskyexists]

Reading that children of time book. It's fun! But seriously, did they deliberately separate the tenthousands survivors out across colony ships in a way that all existing kin bonds and community bonds were severed??? Why????

All authors but especially sci fi authors love to do a sleight of hand trick where the characters are all low level sprung from seafoam. That's how they become intrepid explorers or heroes, concerned only with themselves and some higher purpose/obstacle course.

Anyway. I kinda love how much fun the author seems be having developing this intelligent spider species as a deeply sexist society. REAL matriarchy. The sexual dimorphism is ENORMOUS and the instinct to kill the male after mating doesn't help. Love how the author keeps establishing the society that way and then in the same breath establishing definitively uh yeah the males are people too. Very telling to start that first scene, when the first Spider Hero Portia works together with an ally - to make that ally not another female but a MALE. And again and again as males prove noble, useful, resourceful, intelligent etc. and after 2000 years spider society has become no longer accepting of just killing males left and right to eat. Except, girls will be girls. LOL. WHAT A JOKER. And they seem to be on the precipice of a truly revolutionary social technology ..... FEMINISM!

Though unfortunately the human characters are not 50/50 male female at All.

This ship society seems so weird. They have no pre-existing ties to each other - it seems. They're all low level hostile and miserable all the time. They have no explicitly military structure but they do obey commander tyrants rather matter of factly

Also - this society's tech is largely based on whatever they could rescrounge from the Ancient Empire. And they sent ONE CLASSICIST who can read old languages. Pardon? The text also argued that Imperial C language (English? Chinese?) was so scarce they couldn't machine translate it but Holsten COULD do it. That's just stupid

Also it seems absolutely insane to me how the narrative describes such relentless throwing of people at problems here. No 'precious humanity' philosophy here. They're burning the last human DNA packets like there's billions more but NO THEY ARE THE LAST OF HUMANITY.

In fact, Holsten is developing language algorhithhms and indexing systems By Him Self. Why? The field wasn't completely desolate was it. And it must have had protocols and systems for 150 years recently. Its all just to make the protagonist an underdog (aw. No one likes him. Misunderstood smart guy) and seem more competent.

Can spiders not be vaccinated?