The sexual dimorphism comes into play because male spiders are the victims of sexism in spider society. They are smaller, weaker, but eventually work towards equality.
That book is interesting but nightmare inducing!
It also introduced to me the concept of software archeologists.
His books are easily top 3 for me now
I never expected that the chapters about giant, intelligent spiders to be the parts that kept me hooked. I'm not sure I could have cared less about what happened to the humans.
That book will give you a new perspective on the term "weaponized autism".
My favorite passage in the book:
> There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it — the horror of it, Sura said — was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex — and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.
The author will actually respond to you his email domain is the name of the ISP from the first book! His books are easily top 3 for me now
I'm 85 pages in, so the sexist tones are there... but not in full force (yet, by the sounds of it). Portia's note on the male spiders always thinking about fear was... interesting. But also useful insight at the time lol.
This book is really expensive as a hardcover! I had to look around to make sure it's not a glitch.
It goes for $180-$374 on amazon.com and $630-$1222. $800 on ebay.com even! Woah.
I'm guessing it's out of print and extremely popular?
Edit for typo
There was an issue a while ago with resellers that would look for items on amazon, and create a duplicate listing with a slightly higher price. If they got an order, they could buy the item from another amazon seller, and onsell the item for a profit.
This broke in a predictably amusing way when there were only a few vendors for an item, and all of them were doing the same thing - each vendor updating their price to be higher than the others, quickly spiralling up to ludicrous values.