[ryanblakeley]

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

[ScotterC]

Re: Ecology in Scifi

The interactions between Ants and Spiders gave me some associations with Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lilith's Brood). Particularly, I loved how both were painting an alternative evolutionary path but 'grafting on' to existing notions and understandings of what we know to be true in species development. I wish there was more of this! I felt Children of Ruin was weaker in this regard, maybe because the conflict for the species was absent. The Spiders vs Ants and then Spiders vs Humans being conflicts which created a fanstatic narrative to explain alternative solutions to prisoner's dilemma (spiders choosing to co-opt their enemies' strengths or in Lilith's brood, Oankali being a hybrid of alien/human). I'd be curious to learn if there's more examples in zoology/ecology of species choosing this route instead of competition every time - and also, what factors might impact this.

[grimgrin]

I'll piggyback this sci-fi thread to link the beginning of Phase IV, because I rather like it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTv4WYHsncQ

The plot: "After a spectacular and mysterious cosmic event, ants of different species undergo rapid evolution, develop a cross-species hive mind, and build seven strange towers with geometrically perfect designs in the Arizona desert."

[SeanAnderson]

Love this book! I wrote Adrian after reading it and asked for permission to build a game inspired by it and received his blessing (https://i.imgur.com/JWwNMR4.png) :)

(slight spoilers, FYI)

https://ant.care/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants It's my first game, so it's going pretty slowly, but the goal is to have the player fill the role of the Eliza/Kern hybrid. You send commands to your pet ant colony once-per-day when orbiting the planet gives you line-of-sight. The act of caring for the pet gives you a renewed sense of purpose and a reason to care for yourself and is a mechanism for helping undue the insanity and create personal growth.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the game mechanics will look like (if you have suggestions, I'm all ears!), but I took a stab at some creative writing to build up the plot a bit. It feels very Children of Time-y and some might enjoy reading bits of it:

Half-Assed Technical Document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ACH1XLCn7hkKz2dhuL1c_nx...

Freeform Creative Writing of Scripted Game Intro:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wET9mWaYae_GMqbm8n37UoNF...

---

Regarding the interview, I would love to know more about his process for deciding which aspects of an animal's ecology/behavior to represent in his fiction.

Tynan Sylvester (creator of RimWorld, a popular video game) wrote this article called The Simulation Dream, https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-simulation-dream, and I think about it a lottt. One concept Tynan stresses for creating a rich and engaging simulation is to "Choose the minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you want to generate."

I would love to know why Adrian chose to give ants/spiders/(octopi..) the behaviors they have throughout his series and, if he considered other behaviors that he ultimately omitted, what his thought process was for ruling those other behaviors out.

[photochemsyn]

Great idea. Leaf-cutter ants have something like five worker castes (soldier, excavator, forager, garbage collector, gardener) so managing that distribution might be a fun part of a game (tending towards Ant Factorio). e.g.

https://youtu.be/VLBDVXLiWxQ?t=301

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Hey, that's cool. Here's my game- not inspired by Adrian's work (though I contacted him to ask him about a tt-rpg of his own called Bugworld and on which Shadows of the Apt was based). But it's about insects:

https://github.com/stassa/nests-and-insects

Haven't worked on that for a while though.

[BlueTemplar]

Thanks, this has put in perspective my frustrations with RimWorld simulation being a bit skin-deep... also how that frustrating rotting plants issue that you get zero advanced warning for might have made it into RimWorld !

Also : https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=57492.msg497822#ms...

[mcmoor]

About that Simulation Dream article, one dangerous thing about relying on apophenia is when the player model requires something but the game model can't answer it. It sometimes lead to immersion breaking, like I experience myself in RimWorld. In fact, the dream of super sophisticated game model is likely so that it can answer anything player model come up with.

[arc-in-space]

This is super random but for a brief time I happened to be in a WoW guild with Adrian, did some raiding together. Really should get around to reading Children of Time at some point.

[vagrantJin]

I love Adrian's work.

Take my money.

[fritzo]

Question for Adrian: All your sentient beings are animal-like: they are discrete animals that move around, or at weirdest are a ruinous sludge that moves around and assumes the form of animals. But might we see mycelium networks as sentient?

Zoubin Ghahramani argues that intelligence is about motion, that the sea squirt digests its own brain as soon as it settles down. But might there be intelligent communities of static individuals that nevertheless form dynamic networks?

[bellorap]

Could you link to where Zoubin Ghahramani talks about that? Curious but can’t find it in my web search

[fritzo]

Sorry, I don't see anything public. I remember a particular talk he gave in maybe 2018 or 2019 while he was at Uber. IIRC the talk started roughly:

<shows picture> Do any of you know what this animal is? This is a sea squirt. What's interesting about the sea squirt is that it has a brain --but for only part of its life. It starts out mobile, seeking a place to live. But once it finds a place, it fixes itself to a rock and digests its brain. What this shows us is the purpose of intelligence: it is motion. Intelligence is about moving things around. <continues to argue that AI is central to Uber's mission...>

[wonderwonder]

I really liked Children of Time and Ruin. I could not get through Children of memory and its very rare for me to abandon a book. It just seemed very different than the prior ones for me. Maybe I will give it another shot. With that said I loved his Final Architecture series and just finished the final book in it.

[laylower]

Hi Ryan,

This is really cool. I read the trilogy, time, ruin, memory in 5-6 sessions and I loved it.

Questions I would ask: 1) Where does he draw his inspiration from? 2) Should we expect to continue seeing Adrian putting together such amazing books so prolifically? 3) Does he believe that the outcome of his trilogy would be the most probable? 4) Besides arthropods do any other species stand a chance against primates?

[zabzonk]

not to mention ant-based computers hosting super-human level AIs, which seems highly unlikely. but it did work for terry pratchet.

[bebopfunk]

If you’re interested in ecology in science fiction you should give Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez a read. It’s not about ants specifically, but they play a large roll in a way (I don’t want to spoil too much and it’s been long enough since I read it I can’t remember what’s a spoiler or not). It’s a good read.

[renjimen]

Olaf Stapledon has two sci fi works that incorporate many ecological ideas into his vision of a future history of the human species (Last and First Men) and his ideas for possible alien life (Star Maker). They are both incredible works of human imagination

[romaintailhurat]

Love all the scifi recommendations in this thread!

[abrookewood]

Can you please let everyone know where this interview will be available?

[ssnri]

I enjoyed that book. After I read it I made my bio on dating apps: “Active, creative, hairy; but enough about Portia spiders.”

My question is: how successful do you think that’s been for me as a straight man?

[gryn]

Depends on your metric for success I guess.

- number of matches ? Probably not. - number of fellow fans ? Probably.

[ryanblakeley]

Is sexual cannibalism off the table?

[snapcaster]

It depends on how physically attractive you are obviously, that variable confounds everything people say about dating apps and what works or doesn't

[ssnri]

I go to yoga studios and the instructors hit on me.

Still have a mostly shit time with apps. Not zero dates, but going out and doing things in the real world is a much better strategy.

Being attractive is probably enough for women, not men though.

[lukan]

"Being attractive is probably enough for women, not men though. "

That is valid only for a certain subset of humanity.

[Jemaclus]

You said "book" (singular), and I just wanted to let you know it's actually a trilogy, so there are more if you want to read them!

[dmix]

I'm not sure talking about hairy spiders in your opening sentence will work wonders with women.

[Loughla]

It won't work until it works really well with one specific woman.

[AlecSchueler]

I'm not sure women are as homogeneous as you're suggesting.

[ssnri]

I guess I’ll have to fall back on my oversized genitals

[tomcam]

Can't unsee this