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Tchaikovsky's octopuses
Apr. 15th, 2020 03:32 pmChildren of Ruin is the sequel to Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. If you liked Children of Time, I think it's a safe bet to say you'd like Children of Ruin.
I'm not going to talk about writing craft or the plot or even what I liked best. Instead I'm going to talk about the octopuses. Portiid spiders were what came into their own in Children of Time; it's octopuses in this book.
Tchaikovsky does a breathtaking job conveying such an alien form of intelligence--an individual octopus isn't really a centralized consciousness the way a person is. Three components play a role in each octopus's personhood--their crown, which is their central brain; their reach, which is the intelligence in each of their arms (which in this story are sort of the R&D and operations aspect to the crown's executive function); and their guise, which is the play of mood and emotion they display on their skin. You know how a person can say one thing with their mouth and another with their facial expression? Well that's an octopus, only more so. And then imagine that meanwhile your hands are doing calculations, examining data, scenario planning--and communicating, independently of your awareness, with the hands of other people. And imagine that that communication can affect how you feel and think about things.
It's such a different way of thinking, but I really believed in it, could imagine it.
And as time has gone by since I finished the book, it's come to me that human communities are like octopuses. Our guises are our expressive cultures--our songs and TV shows and architecture and so on. Our crowns are the voices among us, institutional or individual, that speak for the community. And our reaches are the various groups in society actually doing things, figuring out things, providing things. The reaches of one community talk to the reaches of other communities, and that affects what the crown ends up expressing. And meanwhile Facebook and Twitter memes and TV and radio advertisements pick up and express lightning fast the mood and emotion of communities--those are our guises.
Wittingly or unwittingly, I think Tchaikovsky must have been drawing on this when he created the octopuses. It's what makes their style of thought and interaction relatable--we do think like this, but in the aggregate rather than individually.
Just like human communities have a hard time rallying to a common purpose, so do the octopuses. But it's not impossible for either the octopuses or for us.
... Anyway, that's me in my role as reach, communicating with you other reaches out there.
I'm not going to talk about writing craft or the plot or even what I liked best. Instead I'm going to talk about the octopuses. Portiid spiders were what came into their own in Children of Time; it's octopuses in this book.
Tchaikovsky does a breathtaking job conveying such an alien form of intelligence--an individual octopus isn't really a centralized consciousness the way a person is. Three components play a role in each octopus's personhood--their crown, which is their central brain; their reach, which is the intelligence in each of their arms (which in this story are sort of the R&D and operations aspect to the crown's executive function); and their guise, which is the play of mood and emotion they display on their skin. You know how a person can say one thing with their mouth and another with their facial expression? Well that's an octopus, only more so. And then imagine that meanwhile your hands are doing calculations, examining data, scenario planning--and communicating, independently of your awareness, with the hands of other people. And imagine that that communication can affect how you feel and think about things.
It's such a different way of thinking, but I really believed in it, could imagine it.
And as time has gone by since I finished the book, it's come to me that human communities are like octopuses. Our guises are our expressive cultures--our songs and TV shows and architecture and so on. Our crowns are the voices among us, institutional or individual, that speak for the community. And our reaches are the various groups in society actually doing things, figuring out things, providing things. The reaches of one community talk to the reaches of other communities, and that affects what the crown ends up expressing. And meanwhile Facebook and Twitter memes and TV and radio advertisements pick up and express lightning fast the mood and emotion of communities--those are our guises.
Wittingly or unwittingly, I think Tchaikovsky must have been drawing on this when he created the octopuses. It's what makes their style of thought and interaction relatable--we do think like this, but in the aggregate rather than individually.
Just like human communities have a hard time rallying to a common purpose, so do the octopuses. But it's not impossible for either the octopuses or for us.
... Anyway, that's me in my role as reach, communicating with you other reaches out there.
