Brenda Hoffman
Caleb Strite, former writing tutor on the St. Augustine campus, and Professor Matt Giddings enjoy reading and talking about books. This week's blog features them making a case for reading Spiderlight and Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Matt begins the discussion: Whenever we—Caleb Strite and Matt Giddings—talk, we nearly always end up discussing one or another of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s works. A prolific and versatile writer, Tchaikovsky has published many sci-fi and fantasy novels that really wander all over the genre. But there does seem to be one theme that he just can’t quite get away from: non-human intelligence. It shows up over and over in his work, and not just as a superficial depiction of aliens or fantasy races; it’s a topic that he likes to chew on and deeply explore in his work. This makes his work stand out from other depictions of diverse life in sci-fi and fantasy. Consider, for example, “Star Trek” and Star Wars. Most of the aliens in either of those media franchises are merely slightly odd people. There’s no awareness of the idea that a fundamentally alien life form might have radically different cognition than we do (there is one obvious exception that comes to mind, that of the Horta, a silicon-based rock creature in The Original Series, S1E25). Tchaikovskly, on the other hand, wants his sentient species to have all the qualities that aliens do in other media with the added depth of spending time pondering how biological beings entirely separate from humanity would think, see, and experience the world. The pinnacle example of this is Children of Time, his award-winning novel from 2015. While we could easily spend pages hyping that book up (and you really should check it out), we wanted to focus on two of his shorter works that delve into his skill of crafting conscious creatures.
Made Things, a novella of his that Tor Dot Com published in 2019, is another attempt to depict and wrestle with the idea of non-human intelligence. In this case, it’s homunculi—little made objects animated by magic. The setting is a big fantasy city and the main character, Coppelia, is a thief and scam artist living in the slums, eking out a criminal existence in the city’s underclass while she warily avoids the authorities. What makes her story interesting, however, is that she’s got some friends—homunculi—who have taken up with her because she can make puppets, and that skill might allow her to craft bodies for the homunculi’s children.
I think that Made Things suffered from being a novella. The fantasy setting is described only briefly, and the plot is quite speedy, which is what you need in a 175-page novella, but as a result, the most interesting thing in the story—the origins and society of the homunculi—is given only a brief and partial glimpse. In Children of Time, for example, the spiders who are the aliens in the story get a huge chunk of space in the text, which allows Tchaikovsky to spend a long time explaining their societal development and cognition. In Made Things, that really wasn’t possible given the limits of the story; instead, a brief but tantalizing depiction of a tower with magic that animated all the objects in it resulting in a society of animated candles, paper, rope, and cloth people has to suffice. It’s so tantalizing: “[t]he Folded One who kept and taught the lore of magic, the great and varnished lords of the Woodmen, the polished metal chiefs of the Sculls, the most embroidered Fabrickers, the Candle Kings, all the leaders of the different tribes” a glimpse of a whole hierarchy of little made people! It was a shame, since I really wanted to know about the social class system of the tower works! Why are little paper people in charge? (They’re made of folded up pages of spellbooks, origami style!!).
Having said that, I still enjoyed Made Things a great deal—at this point, I’ve read more than 25 of Tchaikovsky’s books, and he hasn’t had a miss yet. Made Things is by turns, exciting and bittersweet. I just wish it were another 200 pages longer! I sometimes get the impression that Tchaikovsky is so bursting with ideas that the novellas he writes are just to get these ideas out of his head and on paper. And so, what might have been a long novel detailing the homunculi society is a series of brief glimpses instead.
The interesting thing here, re: non-human intelligence is that the homunculi aren’t really all that different than humans, cognition-wise. They seem to think the same as we do, which is unusual for a Tchaikovsky book. Instead, they have interesting motivations: the gathering of materials for bodies (babies, actually) and the gathering of magical items to power the ‘birth’ of the new babies. The fascinating and unexpected thing is that the homunculi broke out of their home and entered the world to complete with the humans: “[the wizard] had not meant a thriving culture of made-people to grow up about his frozen ankles; he had not meant any of it, and whatever meaning they could lay claim to came from their actions, and not their mythology.” The made people even have myths!
Caleb’s turn: Another aspect of Tchaikovsky’s non-human exploration is comparing humanity to those non-humans and exploring what it means to be a ‘person’—sentient, intelligent, and equal. I recently read Spiderlight, which is another novella originally published in serial form by Aethernet magazine in 2013; it is ostensibly a classic fantasy tale about a disparate band of heroes on a prophesied quest to end the reign of a dark lord, but beneath this veneer is an inquiry into what it means to be human and whether non-human beings are equal to human
Spiderlight opens with Nth, a spider living in a forest called Mother’s Brood with his brethren. The opening sentence sets up a key difference between spider kind and humanity: speech and communication. “The words that twanged and thrummed their way to Nth said, New food coming, and he stirred, resettling his legs to take the measure of the message.” As in Children of Time, Tchaikovsky highlights the fact that spiders fundamentally do not possess a sense of hearing and therefore communicate through vibrations in the ground and webs. Tchaikovsky sets this in direct contrast to the humans. Dion, a priestess of the Church of Armes (the ‘light side’), later communicates telepathically with the matriarch of the spider society, Mother, and yet doesn’t believe that she is fully intelligent, hearing “A resonant, female voice, but that was just her imagination gifting humanity and character where there was none.” As part of a deal they make with Mother, Nth is sent as a guide to aid the party on their quest. However, they immediately run into a dilemma: Nth has no way to communicate with them. Their solution is for their mage, Penthos, to transform Nth into a human form. Though an incredible feat, this endeavor is not fully accomplished, and Nth is made into a not-quite human in ‘uncanny valley’ territory. Luckily, Penthos is magically able to impart many of his concepts and his ability of speech to Nth.
Yet, Nth initially struggles with his new form. “At first the new body… had dominated his attention…” Instead of being able to sense every vibration through the ground and webs, “there was a raucous cacophony of sound that battered in through his unwanted ears, out of which, somehow, he could still parse the gibbering that was the way that these Men communicated among themselves.” Nth is also baffled by his magnified ability to see (not helped by the fact that Penthos was unable to gift him with eyelids), and the constant visual overstimulation lends to his struggle to adapt.
With this foundation, each member of the party struggles with varying difficulty in accepting Nth as a fully sentient equal. A key aspect of this is accepting that Nth, a spider and a “creature of darkness,” holds emotions and motivations that are as valid as humanity’s. They initially refer to him as a freak and “it.” Conversely, Nth himself has a journey of accepting humanity; “He had been trying to think of his captors as just ‘Man,’ the homogenous mass he had perceived in the forest, but… They were individuals, each with different things to fear and loathe about them.” Seeing each other as individuals worthy of equal status is the crux of Spiderlight, and Tchaikovsky expertly navigates the topic. The novella also deals with religious extremism and the dangers of “othering” groups of people into good and bad categories, the message ultimately being that each other as individuals with hopes, emotions, dreams, and humanity is paramount.
We hope you enjoyed thinking about non-humans with us! We’re both big fans of Tchaikovsky’s works, and I think I can say we’d both recommend anything of his to any reader looking for an interesting and thought-provoking time! As always, feel free to stop by the Readers’ Guild on the three St. Johns River State College campuses to chat about what you’re reading!
