Spider Girl
Spiders have taken over my backyard. They are huge and multicolored; yellow, red, black, brown. They perch in their webs, which they weave from the lemon tree to the agave, the hibiscus to the aloe. Some of their gossamer glitters with early morning dew but is gone by the blazing heat of the LA afternoons; the rest remains wrapped around the cacti day after day, like sticky blankets. It gives the yard a haunted, neglected look. It’s their garden now.
In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, Earth is uninhabitable and humans terraform other planets. On one of these new worlds, a virus with the power to speed up evolution finds an unexpected host: spiders. Over the next several thousand years, the virus turns them from simple arachnids into unrecognizably intelligent beings. The spiders are individuals,
