On humanity's portrayal in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time
I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time yesterday. The novel basically follows parallel storylines between humans embarked in a post-world's-end survival mission on a giant spaceship with whatever's left of humanity, and spiders in a wild planet getting genetically engineered for intelligence and sentience by a rogue virus. The spiders evolve fascinatingly across various generations, starting from 0 (fully wild arthropods) to developing communication, empathy, communities, animal herding, agriculture, to genetic engineering and biotechnology of such sophistication that it becomes the foundation of all engineering from civil and military to computing and spacefaring. The humans, meanwhile, are shown to be so ridiculously juvenile and idiotic they keep infighting and wasting away generations to devolve from an originally intelligent race to space baboons. I foolishly kept thinking their behavior was just a part of some character development to help empower them and come out eventually to the top, but no - they progressively get more and more hopeless, and frustratingly so because the main reason behind it all is that they just can't be made to behave. One would think that a mission as critical at this, with the entire human species' survival at stake would be headed by the best mankind had to offer, but here the mission is headed by people you wouldn't trust to handle a camping trip in the suburbs. The lowest of boats in the lowest of real-life navies would have more discipline, coordination and chain-of-command than these bumbling idiots. None of the human characters are likeable and have any meaningful development till the end where they very aptly get raided, brainwashed and dominated by a species indefinitely more primitive and wild than their own. The sting of frustration this story gives is very real.
But once you mull over it, you realize it was the point all along. The author gives loads of page-time to the human characters (roughly half of the whole story), makes them go through several story arcs, and then gives a macabre subversion of them being space monkeys all along, undeserving of development. And their defeat is not so much a result of overwhelming circumstances, but from fundamental flaws that have plagued humans since time immemorial. The humans' saga isn't meant to be a traditional space hero story - it is meant to be an autopsy of a failed intelligent species. The frustratingly flawed crew of the ship are not just the wrong people handed power - they are a result of several generations of trauma and post-apocalyptic rot. Their civilization has crumbled, archives degraded, understandings waned, language drifted. Their perception of old generations is an overtly mythologized as "ancient Gods" who once walked on earth gloriously with unimaginable technologies but are no more. As you compare them with the wild spiders who start from nothing but are genetically instilled to work together with open distribution and regeneration of knowledge, it turns out they could easily surpass understandings of the technologically superior humans in a fraction of the time. This hammers in the fact that intelligence and technology by themselves are not enough - to prosper you need wisdom, fluidity of ideas and above all - fraternity. In the end, the book isn't a space adventure at all. It is meant as a comparison and contrast between two fictional species and their approach to sentience and intelligence, an exploration of how societies rise and fall against their fundamental principles. It's more a philosophical piece than a classic science fiction story, whether or not the author meant it that way.
I appreciate the author's genius. It still stings the more you understand it though.