Above-Average Space Spiders: Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time"

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time was oddly off my radar: not a lot of discussion about it in the circles I follow, despite it winning the 2016 Clarke Award. Really glad I got around to reading it though: an immensely enjoyable, pretty light, but very science-fictional read. It's in a weirdly specific sub-genre, building heavily on the work of David Brin and, most particularly, Vernor Vinge.

Elevator pitch: Uplifted jumping spiders battle a human-crewed generation starship.

YOU HAD ME AT JUMPING SPIDERS. Slightly more of a review, and a low possibility of spoilers, below:

Weird & Wonderful- The Island of Dr. Moreau

For the last meeting of the Weird & Wonderful club at City Lit Books, we discussed The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) by H.G. Wells. Spoiler: it's about a mad scientist who's turning animals into human-like creatures through surgical techniques.

By a considerable margin, this is the oldest work we've discussed, and it's intriguing how well it's held up. In addition to the strengths of the writing, we talked a lot about the novel in comparison to other stories of "going wild" and animal concerns, as well as The Island as a horror story. Brief notes below:

Chicago Nerds- Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard

For July's Chicago Nerd Social Club book discussion, we talked about Lawrence M. Schoen's 2015 novel "Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard".

It's a science fiction tale told tens of thousands of years in the future--after baseline humanity is extinct, in fact. Their descendants are an interstellar community of uplifted mammals. On Barsk, the only world populated by elephants, they have discovered a drug that allows telepathically-sensitive Speakers to communicate with the dead.

The plot kicks off when ancient prophecies and clandestine government interests threaten Barsk's elephants with destruction. Spoilers and brief notes after the jump: