Everything Is Spiders: Decline And Fall of the Human Empire

[magistrate]

Here is an exceedingly smart novel, half an intricately-detailed xenofictive narrative and half a grinding post-apocalyptic dystopia which approaches the bleak desolation of Octavia Butler's works. It also features:

• Antpunk industrialization
• Alien gender politics
• Potentially not crazed AIs
• Definitively crazed uploaded intelligences
• Non-uploaded intelligences where it's legitimately difficult to tell if they're crazed or not
• The friability of memory and history
• Extreme domestication
• The inhumanity of man to man
• The inhumanity of man to spiders
• Projectile empathy
• Couples I ship because one ate the other
• An iterative succession of Fabians

Not recommended for arachnophobes without nanoviral therapy.

...I'm not sure why you're still reading this post and not rushing to get the book.

Comments

[rachelmanija]

I haven't read it yet (because I'm still in the middle of Everything Is Bugs) but I instantly knew which author you were talking about.

[magistrate]

I haven't yet read Everything Is Bugs, mostly because all my fiction-buying recently seems to be stuff that's gone on sale. But one day! One day.

[squeemu]

Couples I ship because one ate the other

My brain initially parsed this as "starships I 'ship because one consumed the other" and had a wildly different picture in my head from what probably actually happens in the book.

[magistrate]

I think you're describing some sort of strange Radch fanfic, there.

(I might still ship it.)