#portiids

[twogeeseinatrenchcoat]

Only in Children of Time would you ever find a space battle between hyper-intelligent spiders and octopi with an AI stored in a shit ton of ants with a god complex controlling the spider's ship.

Gonna go on a small rant here.

Adrian Tchaikovsky writes other species/alien species so well. Like, so well. He has ideas that are so out there I would never even think of them, let alone know how to incorporate it. He's just so good at writing something so entirely different from anything people are used to, and I love that. It makes everything in the books 100x better, and much more intriguing.

He also does a great job with the science-y side of it. He manages to fit in all of this random information about cell structures and DNA and technology and how the different species think, and it's seamlessly incorporated with the rest of the story. Nothing gets bogged down by a random bunch of information about how different the cells of the animals on this new planet are, because it fits. He's not just putting it there for "oh hey, it's a sci-fi book, gotta have some science-y mumbo jumbo in there," no, it actually adds to the story. It serves to show just how different, how alien everything is.

Go read the books, I'd recommend them for anyone who enjoys sci-fi and can get through fairly wordy books. They're around 500-600 pages each.

[notgyro]

Has anyone made a Portiid OC yet? Like as in an OC of one of the sentient spiders from Children of Time.

If not....should *I* do that?

[approximateknowledge]

im aware the portiid society in children of time is supposed to be this exploration of an alien way to approach technology and the universe but umm

my troll ass just kind of felt at home in it? especially after they figured out the ant-symbiosis

like the whole symbiotic web of biotech, the lack of the concept of family (units) or parental care, even some overlap between schoolfeeding/osmosis and the portiid concept of Understandings, it's all oddly comforting and familiar. and of course the use of ants as both drones and apiary systems

like both use eusocial hymenopterans for computation!

i like the spiders, they know what's up

portiids 🤝 trolls

biotech and symbiosis ftw

[hug-your-face]

@alexmey-does-an-arts you have the opportunity here to make the 2020's Dinotopia-equivalent and I for one am HERE for it

glimpse into my beautiful imaginary world where arthropods are really big and we domesticated them

edit: people are starting to say some "my worst nightmare" or "eeeww no that one is yucky and scary" comments on this like they do on any bug post and id like to say. it's fine if you don't like bugs it's fine if you're scared of bugs but don't put that on MY post clearly talking about how much i like them and how cute i think they are. you can make your own damn post about how much you hate wasps or spiders or whatever. i'm blocking people who make these kinds of comments.

[shadowpeople]

I hope Adrian Tchaikovsky doesn't feel like he can't write any more books about sentient spiders just because he's done it multiple times already. Because I don't think I have a limit in all honesty. There's no point at which I'd be like "ok Adrian, that's enough sentient spiders!" He could keep writing books about sentient spiders indefinitely and I would just keep reading them.

[startledoctopus]

i'm not gonna name names but i think it's a linguistic bias of a lot of the scifi authors i read that when there are aliens and humans in contact that have very different body plans or sensory apparatuses, that they need to create a common language that both parties can fluently use that has the same vocabulary used by all.

there are spoken languages where people with different social identities have different vocabulary words they use, mutually intelligible but women say this word and men say that one (for example).

multilingual families and mixed Deaf and hearing communities develop their own informal idiolects that combine different languages and modalities as needed.

it seems obvious to me that aliens and humans could develop a rich joint language in which the vocabulary items differed between species but the meanings and grammar are the same.

[phantomoftheshoppera]

how am I supposed to take your review seriously when you so obviously missed the point of the book

[podcastgirlsweek]

I think you reblogged that to the wrong blog but the spiders can be podcasters honorarily

Oh god not again. Thanks for the heads up!

But yeah if you like AIs and lossy copies and space and horror (all audio drama staples) you should read Children of Time! It's great.

[flyingbooks42]

When I was reading Children of Ruin, I wondered what trans Portiid experiences might be like, so I wrote a short little fic about it.

[readingtoinfinity]

Children of Ruin (and a comparison with Children of Time)

I read Children of Time back in July, before I started this Tumblr experiment. I read it at the recommendation of HelloFutureMe (aka Tim Hickson) and I really enjoyed it. It played out a lot like the best Star Trek episodes, with a great deal of empathy and understanding for the Other. The mechanics of spider society were a personal favorite, from the mechanisms of cities to the politics of gender.

Recently, I have finished reading its sequel, Children of Ruin. I will be going into some spoilers for both books, but if you want to know my recommendation: I think it's good, and I did finish it, but it's not as good as the first book, and I'm going to take a break before reading the third for personal reasons.

Spoilers started here. You've been warned.

I fucking hate zombies. The shambling, mindless corpses that rise with strange cravings from the dead to attack the living have sat in the amygdala of my brain for years. I can't read most zombie fiction because the sheer fucking tragedy overwhelms me. Even the episode in Gravity Falls unnerves me. It is the ultimate personal fear of me: to become something that was you but is no longer, and cannot control its actions.

It's with this framing that These-Of-We, the brain-eating, assimilating hive mind of the book distinctly scared me. There's a particular chapter in this book where people are taken over and attempt to act as though everything is normal that was haunting and gave me nightmares. I had to read the next bits in the daytime to avoid this, and I almost didn't finish the book.

This hangs like a shadow over everything else the book was doing. Yes, the octopuses are interesting, sociologically-speaking; there's about as much care given to their viewpoints as there were to the Portiids in Children of Time, though it was more difficult to latch onto characters here because the octopuses don't latch onto character traits themselves. The empathy and understanding for the Other is in full swing in this book, particularly regarding the resolution of These-Of-We which is handled rather poetically. And the evolving conflict between the Humans and Portiids with the octopuses is interesting and sci-fi-y, especially regarding the octopuses' bifurcation of language into feelings and numbers. The Crown and Reach mechanism of the octopuses' minds was an especially inspired description of inhuman thinking.

There are flaws, of course; the conflict in the first book was of societal relevance, a personal beef going back thousands of years. The entire book was about how to cross the species divide, whereas here the conflict is a side-plot. There's less understanding about how the divide is bridged, just that we are told Helena knows how to speak the language well enough to get ideas across. I understand creating a language of colors and numbers would be very difficult, but I wonder if the conflict could have been something else entirely. More with understanding the octopuses than speaking to them. Might be a personal thing more than anything else.

But for all of that, the assimilator hangs over everything in my mind. I didn't know I would have that fear before I read it, but now I cannot escape it. To have the human mind converted is one thing; to have it influenced is another; to have it subtly taken over from inside is a third, insidious thing entirely, and I will need to spend some time unpacking that before I dive into the next book.

[twogeeseinatrenchcoat]

Children of Time Rant

Tldr: Read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, it's very good. Also sentient spiders have five names apparently, and there are personalities associated with said names.

Just read through Children of Time (by Adrian Tchaikovsky), started reading Children of Memory, and promptly realised it was the third book and not the second. So now I'm waiting for Children of Ruin (book 2) to arrive on Amazon. Did I start CoT about three days ago? Yes. But I need more spider content. Gimme the spider-Human interactions.

I love how we get five names for those spiders, and one is only used once, but I still remember it because we get five names and they are: Portia (always our PoV), Bianca (always Portia's friend), Fabian (male), Viola (important side character), and Osric. Osric is mentioned once and it is to tell us that he died.

But like I love how we get around 2000 years worth of spiders and still we have four names in use. Going into the characters (traits associated with names) in more depth: (oh and when I refer to anything relating to gender, the Portiids basically have "reverse sexism: cannibalism edition")

They're always powerful and always smart, the leaders of their society. Fabian is often very outspoken for a male, and he's smart, often a pioneer of technology, which is notable because---again---he's male. Bianca and Portia sometimes switch up, but they swap between scientist and warrior, and are close friends. Fabian is often one of their assistants. Viola is always a high-ranking spider, influential, but a side character. These are basically just their roles and not personalities because those do flip-flop.

Anyways, little rant over. Read the book(s). They're good. Or at least the first one, haven't read the second yet.

[gammaraydeath]

actually speaking of the children of time series i know that the rights for a film adaptation have been bought (? or at least they're available to be bought) but i'm gonna be real i think that it's gonna be incredibly difficult to translate a book like that into a movie. like for example you will NEED subtitles for the portiids and having long stretches of the film be silent and subtitled AND focusing on spiders no less (a thing most people hate)... it's gonna be a tough sell. that being said they should hire me when they want this movie made i know my vision for it is leagues above any hollywood suit

[approximateknowledge]

actually i think jumping spiders *should* be portiid-sized (like a basketball in circumference with their legs curled up), and about as intelligent as a cat, and i should be able to have one as a pet

^i want a cat-sized one of these in my house being a lovable little mischief-maker that can tapdance on my bed to wake me up in the morning so i can give her food and skritches and attention

pedipalps doing the little flappy thing like cat ears do

every couple months i could go to the vet for assistance with moulting

need big spooder to bother me in weird ways and leave hairs and webbing in weird places

i can see her make a little web-nest in the upper corner of the room

but alas it's not to be

[unsavory-melon]

Jumping spiders....portiids

God! children of time vibes anyone?

absolutely enraptured rn

[thechurn]

Reading children of ruin now and i could honestly read about human-portiid communication all day

[phantomoftheshoppera]

Haha just like Portiid