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.
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.
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."
(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...
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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.
Take my money.
Also : https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=57492.msg497822#ms...
https://github.com/stassa/nests-and-insects
Haven't worked on that for a while though.
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?
<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...>
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?
My question is: how successful do you think that’s been for me as a straight man?
- number of matches ? Probably not. - number of fellow fans ? Probably.
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.
That is valid only for a certain subset of humanity.