Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Sci-fi action-adventure involving AI, terraforming, and a man-made race of intelligent spiders.

The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō. Philosophy, history, and aesthetics in a 1906 treatise on tea.

Children of Time is awesome. I haven't read the sequel but the prospect of intelligent octopuses certainly whets the appetite.

> I'd recommend Children of Time

I agree! Like the Vinge books mentioned by the GP, the interactions between aliens and humans are well written, and nicely bring out the quirks of the different species.

Love the idea! My one suggestion would be to add the ability to filter out children's books from the results. After I added Hitchhiker's Guide, Children of Time, and the Iliad, the majority of my recommendations were children's books. Or, maybe the tool is telling me something...

Ants are used for computation in "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Really good story.

"Children of Time" is fantastic and "Three Body Problem" is good. I haven't read the rest of the Three Body series but it seems popular.

I immensely enjoyed Children of Time by Tchaikovsky, coincidentally winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke award :)

I enjoy a lot of books from Alastair Reynolds. His fiction is so and so but the science in his book is hardcore. I also liked Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (this one is two volumes).

See also Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time", it's awesome.

I actually enjoyed it a bit more than Children of Time. Both are great books.

Children of Time and Children of Ruin were excellent reads

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is another novel where Portia spiders are featured prominently (great book btw).

The novel "Children of time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky imho greatly picks up this notion among others, highly recommended read

My best guess that kinda, sorta matches your description: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

(I liked that one)

For spider intelligence and an absoutely brilliant science-fiction novel, try Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...

This book really made me realise (once again) how strange and wonderful good science-fiction can be.

Just finished reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which deals with a theme related to that, about a terraformed planet where jumping spiders become a dominant, intelligent species. Good read. You might enjoy it!

You might really enjoy the science fiction novels Children of Time and Children of Ruin, if you haven’t already. Or hell, based on your comments, maybe you wrote them! Either way, they are spectacular and thought-provoking.

If you enjoyed those books, I'd recommend Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky as well! It explores the concept of a race of spiders evolving into sentience and how wildly different it's civilization and technology would be.

The article mentions the Portia jumping spider. Children of Time is a novel that explores descendants of Portia spiders who evolve to become a complex technological society and it’s a really enjoyable read :)

Children of Ruin is the sequel of Children of Time, I strongly suggest you read the first book or you'll have quite an hard time to understand certain things.

I'm reading Children of Ruin right now and it's quite funny finding this article here right now. :)

Make sure to read Children of Time first, otherwise some of the context will be lost.

For an interesting science fiction take on ants you should read the book "Children of Time"! This story of ants adapting reminded me of the ants in that book.

Yeah, it was a fantastic deep dive into how a creature like that perceives and operates within reality. Not as enjoyable as Children of Time IMHO as I preferred the evolutionary journey of the Portiids more, but still excellent. Ending was lacking though. Hope he does a third book.

I STRONGLY suggest you first read Children of Time and only then Children of Ruin, you'd miss a ton of pieces and some parts of the story wouldn't be clear at all.

There is a book, Children of Time, I caution that it isn't actually a good book, its a bit ridiculous, but it was fun to explore what an earth-like planet would be like if spiders became the sentient species.

If you like sci-fi, Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky plays with this concept. It's the second book in a series though, first being Children of Time.

Super imaginative and well written, I really liked them.

Children of time[1] is a remarkable piece of writing. I wish I could unread it just so I could read it for the first time again

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718

Semi-related tangent: Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" is first-rate scifi that explores ideas about accelerated evolution and insect intelligence; highly recommended.

On that note, I also highly recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time.

I didn't mean to imply that. Indeed, Portia!

So if you love Portia, I recommend Peter Watts' Echopraxia and (for a full-length focus) Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time.

Just to elaborate (mild spoilers):

At some point in the Children of Time book, ant colonies become domesticated and are cultivated into general computation "devices".

I definitely recommend the first book, but have yet to finish the second one.

That's a good point. It's easy to 'never run out of books'. It's quite easy to 'run out of books in the particular category I like'.

If anybody has recommendations for books like Zombie (fiction) or Children of Time (a novel told in part from the perspective of an advanced, non-human society), I'd be very happy to hear them.

Ha! I just finished reading Children of Time and am reading CoR right now. Humanity eerily reflects the current state of the US in those books.

Related tangent: Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" (and sequel "Children of Ruin") is first-rate scifi that explores these kinds of questions, featuring artificially-accelerated evolution resulting in hyperintelligent insect and arachnid societies. Highly recommended.

Children of Time & Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The first chronicles the development of sentient, space-capable spiders. The sequel follows the development of octopuses. I found both to be quick, easy reads - perfect for vacation or a rainy weekend. In both, the psychology of the species, and how humans can relate, is a plot point.

Yeah - oh man, I'm terrible with names. Adrian Tchaikovsky's a really good execution guy - fantastic standalone novels, not with anything especially out there, but really well done. I was really impressed by The Freeze Frame Revolution, and Children of Time was also good. His fantasy stuff is pretty uninspired, though.

"children of time" & the sequel "children of ruin" by Adrian Tchaikovsky; sci-fi with AIs, uplifted species, uploaded personalities, space travel et al.

Very entertaining, and quite optimistic, compared to a lot of stuff I'd been reading recently.

(I discovered it by someone's comment on HN, by the way.)

If you find this interesting, I'd recommend reading the SciFi novel Children of Time. Really, the less you know about the book the better. It's full of surprises.

If anyone is else is interested in thought experiments on how other forms of intelligence / sapience may evolve, try to read "Children of Time" and "Children of Ruin" by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Also if anyone else has other books that follow similar themes, please recommend!

To piggyback on the sci-fi theme, some of the best sci-fi from the past few years has been Adrian Tchaikovsky's novel Children of Time and its follow-up Children of Ruin, which explore the idea of an artificial virus that interacts with genomes and allows for a sort of genetic memory.

I read a ton, and without a doubt, one of the best sci-fi books I've read in the last 10 years is "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Read it. Seriously. Runner-up might be "Spaceman of Bohemia" by Jaroslav Kalfar.

Some highlights of the year:

Children of Time - (Tchaikovsky)

Steve Jobs (Isaacson) - as an aside, I've started reading his daughters (Lisa) book Small Fry

The Colour out of Space - (Lovecraft)

iWoz (Wozniak)

The Design of Everyday Things (Norman)

I just this morning on the train finished the rather enjoyable Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which features a planet of sentient Portia Labiatas. Then came your comment and your lovely Medium article, which made me realize that the author had not overstated the characteristics of these animals at all. You may enjoy the book if you like sci-fi.

Anyone interested in thinking about this should read Children of Time and the sequel Children of Ruin.

The first is about the (accidental) future uplift of spiders via genetic engineering and evolution, the sequel about octopuses. The author does an excellent job of imagining how this might come to pass.

Oh man, I just finished reading Children of Time[1] which involves sentient spiders. One of the main characters was named Portia.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29776274-children-of-tim...

Hard sci fi is hard to define for me personally. But, Children of Time by Adrian Czajkowski is worth a look, and maybe Saturn Run by Ctein and John Sanford.

* Currently reading: Edgedancer

* Flowers for Algernon

* Going Rogue: Spells, Swords, & Stealth

* Split the Party: Spells, Swords, & Stealth

* NPCs

* Children of Time

* Death's End

* The Shining

* IT

* All 7+1 books of The Dark Tower

I had this feeling the entire time I was reading Children of Time, which is some excellent hard sci-fi about portia spiders that hyper-evolved into sentient beings.

The explanations of things in the book were absolutely fascinating, but then I'd try to visualize, and the more I did that the more revolted I got. Such cognitive dissonance. And now I'm psyched for the sequel that just dropped yesterday.

I haven't read Hex, but I just read Children of Time, and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) plays around with the loosely computational nature of an ant colony. Probably a few people thought about it before then, but it's getting closer to the dawn of general computation at that point

Title reminds me of a criminally under-appreciated work of sci-fi: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Evolution takes a long time. And there aren't many (any) environments that we've identified and can reach which are conducive to the sort of life we know about. Also it'd be a bit presumptuous for us to colonize a hospitable planet for our own experimentation.

But it's an interesting question. In fiction, I can recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, and sequel Children of Ruin.

I would heartily recommend "Children of Time" (Children of Time #1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Another one that stands out over the last couple of years (for me) is "The Book of Strange New Things" by Michael Faber, which has a mix of hard sci-fi with some very thought provoking philosophy/religion.

I read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky recently. Quite a lot of the book is told from the perspective of some highly intelligent spiders. The author makes a good attempt at articulating how they might perceive the world around them and how they would consequently struggle to communicate with us.

I don't know if it's accurate but he describes how they communicate primarily using their mandibles, legs and with vibrations through their silk, rather than through audible vibrations like us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)

On a related note of Portia's in literature, well worth checking out Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Not much fiction in here:

* Ender's game

* Children of time

* Kingkiller Chronicle (series)

* Skyward

The second book in the Children of Time series by A. Tchaikovsky deals with rapidly-evolved octopus intelligence. Similar vibe.

I second the recommendation. Children of Time is my all-time favourite sci-fi/alien life novel.

Can't wait to finish what I'm reading currently to get started on Children of Ruin.

* Seveneves (I haven't read much else from Neal Stephenson, but I've heard good things)

* Children of Time / Children of Ruin (both really good)

* Remembrance of Earth's Past (even the fan fiction one is good)

* A lot of stuff from Alastair Reynolds (House of Suns being my favorite)

* Classics like Tau Zero, The Forever War etc.

* A Deepness in the Sky / A Fire Upon the Deep

Although not all of these are strictly considered hard scifi, I guess.

Btw, I love it when somebody asks this question every now and then on HN. Lots of stuff for one's (ever growing) reading list.

Sure, here are the best ones I've read this last year (not all of them are published in 2020 though).

We are legion - D. Taylor. A four book series, haven't read the rest of the books.

Children of time - A. Tchaikovsky

The Unicorn Project - G. Kim. This would be especially interesting for the HN crowd. It's not sf per se, rather more than contemporary fiction, but the main theme is about programming and politics in a big corporation. Quite original and a lot of fun.

Agency - W. Gibson

The space between worlds - M. Johnson

To sleep in a sea of stars - C. Paolini

The algebraist - I. Banks

Hope you'll find something to your liking. Happy new year.

I've also read both books. It's a good exploration into the minds of spiders and octopuses, if given "uplift".

A recent study I read about shows that spider intelligence is ill-studied but actually holds a wealth of interesting facets. Jumping spiders plan, such as when hunting, and can be surprised. They are also doing elaborate planning when building webs, and make adjustments to strength/stickiness in webs based on failed catches. It's sophisticated tool use. And yet their brains are teeny weeny puny things.

Another novel that you might enjoy if you haven't read is "A Deepness in the Sky", it's similar to Children of Time (and predates it), but told in a different way. Both are highly enjoyable and packed with ideas.

I learned way more about spiders in the sci-fi book "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky than I thought I would! The basic premise is that the evolution of spiders on a new planet is hyper-increased, and they become the dominate intelligent species on the planet.

The sexual dimorphism comes into play because male spiders are the victims of sexism in spider society. They are smaller, weaker, but eventually work towards equality.

That book is interesting but nightmare inducing!

I absolutely loved "Children of time" [1] - you can tell the writer is a scientist, or at least very seasoned in natural sciences, mainly biology. The story is not the best but how Tchaikovsky reasons shows how much he is able to think outside the box.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...

The one that sticks in my head the most (and which I did not think I would enjoy based on the book jacket blurb) is "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I highly recommend to anyone who listens. I also recently encountered "The Fifth Science" by someone named 'Exurb1a' and enjoyed it so much that I am now reading another of his books named "Geometry for Ocelots"
Andy Weir's "Hail Mary" is an imaginative and fun read, as is "The Startup Wife" by Tahmima Anam. Oh! And "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet' (or almost anything else) by Becky Chambers.

Others have recommended Three Body. I’d second that. Amazing trilogy.

Rendezvous With Rama is one of my favorites.

I’d also recommend Children of Time and Children of Ruin by adrian tchaikovsky. It was one of those random ones I picked up with low expectations, and it turned out to be amazing. It’s well regarded now, but this was when it first came out.

Dune is one I recommend reading even if you’re aware of the story or the movie. It’s an amazingly creative work that lays the foundation of many modern science fiction concepts.

I’d also highly recommend Fire Upon the Deep.

Last ones I’ll recommend are the space odyssey books. I’m a huge fan of long timelines (if you couldn’t already tell) and this series spans 1000 years.

Books finished in June:

"How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan. A fascinating look into the world and science of psychedelic drugs.

"Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke. One of, if not Clarke's best. It's short for a sci-fi book and almost impossible not to like.

"The Hydrogen Sonata" By Iain M. Banks. It certainly wasn't my favorite culture entry, but it's worth a read none the less. If you haven't read the others in the series I wouldn't suggest starting with it.

"Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It took me a bit to get into this book, but once I did, I really enjoyed it. If you're into long timelines and human existential crisis this is your book.

As far as July goes, I'm digging into "Matterhorn" by Karl Marlantes and "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes.

This reminds me of the beginning of Children of Ruin, the second book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series.

The second book in the Children of Time series touches on this in the path of how octopodes get hyper evolved.

* Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
* Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
* Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert Sapolsky

Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari

Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian is better, stylistically, but changed me less as a person)

The Alchemist and The Fifth Mountain, by Paulo Coelho

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Tribe, by Sebastian Junger

Have you read the book Children of Time? It's a sci-fi novel with (sentient) jumping spiders as protagonists.

You should read Children of Time and then Children of Ruin.

Read the whole Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy a few years back.

Check out 'There Is No Antimemetics Division' -- just the most recent one I read and really enjoyed, quick read too, probably only a few hours if you really dig into it, took me like 4 or 5 IIRC.

Also, because it's timely. A friend recommended me the above book, and it reminded me of this book that I have yet to recommend to him...

The Fifth Science by Exurb1a

Other good ones in no particular order.

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds -- probably my favorite starting point for his work as it's a standalone novel, but I've read everything he's written and enjoyed most of it. This is a story told over the course of multiple tens of millions of years, and it flows well.

Culture Series by Ian M. Banks -- Only made it through the first two books, and really enjoyed them, having trouble getting into the third but I have a feeling I'll enjoy the rest of the series. Just re-read the 2nd a few days ago.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky -- Planet of the Apes but with Spiders, not entirely accurate but an apt teaser I think.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie -- Only got through the first in this series of three, but really enjoyed it.

I've probably burned through another 250 books in the last 5 years or so, this is just top of mind recent memory stuff. I have the good luck that my father is an absolute monster with reading, so I'm a few thousand recommendations behind.

Feel free to reach out, e-mail is username here at gmail.

1. How to Win Friends and Influence People - I recommend because I apply every day at work and reap the results as well, somebody should have recommended this book to me ten years ago;

2. Children of Time - a science fiction book that I enjoyed, I notice that fiction, in general, helps me deal with stressful work, as I disconnect easier and put myself in an imaginary world while reading;

3. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - this isn't a book you read cover to cover, I catch myself thinking long even after reading a single sentence;

1) and 3) I've come across on HN, but 2) was the unexpected random hit.

You should read Children of Time.

Depends what you mean by 'hard'.

Anything by Greg Egan is probably going to be the hardest sci-fi you've ever read. Dude wrote a book where he considered the ramifications of a universe built on a positive-definite Riemannian metric, and another one where the universe has 2 time dimensions.

Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg explores what life might look like if it evolved on a neutron star.

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and Children of Ruin explore the evolution of other earth species if they were given a kick towards sapience.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is half space adventure (not very hard) and half an exploration of a lifeform which only achieves sapience in small groups. A Deepness in the Sky is generally harder and explores a lot of things, including the power of focused human attention, the difficulty of galactic scale civilization, and alien life evolved in a star system where the star periodically dims.

Steven Baxter and Clarke collaborated on The Light of Other Days, which explores the technical and sociological consequences of a device which allows you to see the past.

With a broad interpretation of 'hard' I can highly recommend Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, which have soft science but hard humanity.

Similarly The Long Earth series, a collaboration between Pratchett and Baxter, where it seems Baxter handles the sociological and technological consequences of the science while Pratchett handles the characters and philosophy.

Asimov's I, Robot is an exploration of what happens when you try to constrain intelligence with rules.

Asimov's Foundation Trilogy gets a lot of hype, but it isn't very hard and I also found it utterly mediocre. Instead I recommend The God's Themselves, which is so good it's like Asimov was channeling a much better writer to get his ideas down. It explores the limited interaction of our universe with one that has slightly different physical properties.

Also perhaps stretching the definition of 'hard', but I want to recommend it because it's relatively unknown, is Leonard Richardson's Constellation Games, in which an incredibly advanced multi-species anarchic alien civilization makes first contact with humanity, and the protagonist really just wants to play their video games. It's actually harder sci-fi than it sounds.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1] explores this exact question. In the story, a human consciousness is uploaded to a computer orbiting a planet. Meanwhile spiders on the planet go though an industrial revolution and start using ant colonies as computers, using pheromones to control the behavior of the ants. Over thousands of years the computer housing the orbital consciousness begins to fail and transmits her consciousness to an ant colony on the surface.

In the second book, her brain is then duplicated across multiple colonies. Because the ant computer isn't as powerful as silicon based computers, one of her instances later realizes that she is a significantly compressed version of herself and that she doesn't have most of the old memories, capabilities or capacity for emotions that her human self had, presumably in large part also due to being transferred between three different substrates (flesh, silicon, ants).

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...

I try to read every night before going to bed, and I'm trying to alternate between a technical book, and a pleasure book.

I recently finished the whole lot of Foundation from Asimov, Zero to sold from Arvid Kahl and I'm currently reading "The wealth of Nations" from Adam Smith (Gotta admit, it hurts).

The motivation behind alternating between pleasure and technical is to try to increase my knowledge (even though I feel like I retain 1% of what I read), and to enjoy reading too (with the pleasure book)

On my to read next list, I have:

- High growth Handbook (Elad Gil) (Pleaure book)
- Utopia - Thomas More (Technical)
- Beyond the rift - Peter Watts (Pleasure)
- Manufacturing consent (Noam Chomsky) (Technical)
- Children of time - Adrian Tchaikovsky