{"id":58488,"date":"2026-02-02T12:15:59","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T17:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/?p=58488"},"modified":"2026-02-02T12:15:40","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T17:15:40","slug":"spiderlight-by-adrian-tchaikovsky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/non-fiction\/spiderlight-by-adrian-tchaikovsky\/","title":{"rendered":"Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Spiderlight<\/a>Adrian Tchaikovsky knows what he\u2019s doing. In his Clarke-awarded Children of Time<\/em> (2015), he gave us the arachnophobe\u2019s nightmare, a race of spiders ultra-evolved to sentience thanks to a terraforming\/uplifting project that goes wrong and focusses on the wrong species. Spiderlight<\/em> returns, at least in part, to this scenario: It begins with a brood of sentient spiders racing to protect their Mother from an invasion by humans. But Tchaikovsky is returning to a favourite theme only to shift the conversation along in a number of different directions.<\/p>\n

His first success came with the Shadows of the Apt<\/strong> series (2008-14), fantasy rather than SF, which\u2014so his publisher\u2019s website tells us\u2014had its roots in his university involvement with a role-playing game (Bugworld<\/em>) that then drew him to think about translating insectoid characteristics into human societies. Similarly, within a few pages of Spiderlight<\/em>, it is clear that this is not only a fantasy novel with the obligatory Dark Lord, but that it is in part a generic Quest<\/em> role-playing game spin-off.<\/p>\n

Among the characters are Lief, a seedy sneak thief; Penthos, a pompous wizard; Harathes, a warrior who can actually speak sentences like \u201cIt will be an epic journey \u2026 [a] worthy quest, through monsters and the servants of the Dark one, past evil forests, marshes, and jagged rocks\u201d and mean<\/em> them; and Cyrene, an archer driven to her part in the quest by some anger or guilt. And yes, her anger is to do with the fact that people like Harathes think that one sexual encounter means exclusive possession and \u201cjust because I take up a bow and fight, and don\u2019t just sit in a kitchen with my hair bundled up \u2026 I have to be giving it away.\u201d Heading this bunch of misfits is Dion, brought up in the service of the Light and in the possession of a magical talisman called the Disc of Armes, but already discovering uneasily that Light and Dark are not necessarily the same as Good and Evil.<\/p>\n

But this is all, to repeat a phrase I have already used twice, \u201cin part.\u201d Tchaikovsky might be back on familiar ground, but he is doing something more than giving his growing range of fans something that they have had already.<\/p>\n

There is, of course, a prophecy, and like all prophecies it is carefully ambiguous. In this case, the Dark Lord Darvezian will be defeated by means of a spider\u2019s tooth and his realm entered by means of a \u201cspider\u2019s path,\u201d which turns out to be not so much a map<\/em> as the shared knowledge of the ways and byways into his domain. This knowledge the Spider-mother imparts into one of her brood, Nth, who Penthos transforms into (more or less) human shape. And so the quest is joined by the semi-monstrous Enth, who has to discover by himself such complications as individuality (what is a simple designation of his status as a unit within a mass becomes a name<\/em>), the difficulties of handling only two legs, the incomprehensible nature of human communication, and the attractions (or otherwise) of beer. Much of the story is seen from the point of view of Enth, although each main character is given their own share of viewpoint.<\/p>\n

There are, in the great tradition of RPG fantasy quests, the obligatory borrowings from Tolkien. If The Lord of the Rings<\/em> (1954-5) has its Dark Lord\u2019s nemesis, Aragorn the Ranger, Dion\u2019s team encounter Lothern, a \u201cRanger of Elwer\u201d with a Darkness-detecting lodestone which works perfectly. (The only snag being Lothern\u2019s inability to understand exactly why<\/em> the lodestone is detecting evil wherever they go with their Darkness-spawned human\/spider hybrid<\/em> constantly at their side!) There are also Doomslayers, who perform some of the functions of Sauron\u2019s Nazg\u00fbl. And later, the team enters the realm of the Dark Lord by means of a realm ruled by a spider matriarch, calling up memories of Shelob. But a section entitled \u201cThe Third Rule of Arachnophobics\u201d nods to a very different branch of the fantastic, when it becomes clear that Enth\u2019s ability to fight and kill must be drawn upon only if it can be certain that he would fight for<\/em> his human companions rather than against<\/em> them. The mage Penthos confirms the consensus\u2014Enth must be bound by magical commands not to harm them, not to harm anyone else unless defending itself or ordered to, and to obey orders. Any reader of classic science fiction will here recognise, as Tchaikovsky is nudging them to do, something very like Asimov\u2019s Three Laws of Robotics, and especially the loopholes and contradictions which arise from such \u201claws.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spiderlight<\/em> is, then, certainly an entertaining romp in which Tchaikovsky has enormous fun with the clich\u00e9s of the modes both he and his readers enjoy at face value. In doing so, he cleverly exploits his own gift for turning deeply researched zoology into vivid and plausible world-building. There is, in particular, some clever characterisation with Penthos\u2019s hopeless crush on Dion, and the equally hopeless dimwit hero Harathes. But it is not long before Tchaikovsky turns the quest into an interrogation of the nature of \u201cDark\u201d and \u201cLight.\u201d This is done through Lief who, as the standard character of the \u201cthief,\u201d is allowed a bit of ethical ambiguity anyway. In the \u201cuncertain territory\u201d of Shogg\u2019s Ford, he is ordered to mind Enth and confesses to him in the bar that his recruitment to Dion\u2019s band was as much due to being offered that or \u201cthe mines,\u201d after being caught temple-robbing, as to any moral qualms about Dervezian\u2019s ruthlessness. Equally, we learn about the \u201cHoly City\u201d of Armesion, to which Dion wants to return to seek the blessing of the Potentate for their mission, from Penthos, himself a member of a profession viewed with suspicion by the Righteous: \u201cBeing at the heart of the Light, they are remarkably lax at checking for corruption. It\u2019s amazing what you can get away with \u2026 Or so I\u2019ve heard.\u201d As Lief remarks shortly afterwards, \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of people who make a good living there satisfying needs that the holy and the laudable aren\u2019t supposed to have.\u201d Long before our band enters the realm of the Dark Lord and learns some interesting truths about him, then, we have already had our sense of moral certainty undermined.<\/p>\n

Enth, and the others\u2019 reaction to his nature and his presence, is important here. Enth is a monster, partly because spiders are monsters anyway and partly because in this world the intelligent spiders are creatures of the Dark. But once, for the purpose of the quest, he is transformed into (approximately) human shape, we enter the \u201cuncanny valley\u201d in which he is both somehow less and<\/em> even more monstrous. The reaction of the humans is to consider him as un<\/em>human. His default pronoun among them is simply \u201cit.\u201d As Lief begins to see Enth as simply another misfit on a quixotic quest, however, he starts to chide others for calling him a \u201cmonster\u201d and \u201cit\u201d; and Enth himself, though bound by his Asimovian laws, still insists on some sort of agency when he protests against being called a \u201cthat.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Abnasio, Supreme Prelate of the Brotherhood of the Dawn, seems to have decided that the fulfilment of the prophecy which outlined Dion\u2019s quest involves taking Enth into custody\u2014and into closer acquaintance with some sort of sacred disembowelling fork\u2014Lief goes so far as to channel the dilemma Mark Twain\u2019s Huckleberry Finn faces when he, too, is faced with breaking the moral code he knows<\/em> to be right: \u201cEnth was a creature of Darkness. There was no getting round it. And what if Dion is wrong and Abnasio is right? Am I really about to rescue a monstrous servant of evil from the hands of the righteous?\u201d Like Huck\u2019s \u201c[a]ll right, then, I\u2019ll GO to hell\u201d when he allows his friendship for Jim to trump every sense of morality and right and wrong he has been brought up with, Lief\u2019s \u201c[f]uck the righteous\u201d puts comradeship and compassion above abstract codes. That this does not lead directly to rescue\u2014that the argument that Abnasio is morally wrong<\/em> is reduced to a cut, thrust, and parry academic analysis of obscure texts, as Dion and Abnasio debate the true meaning of the \u201cprophecy\u201d before actual battle commences\u2014is more evidence of Tchaikovsky\u2019s playfulness.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it would have been easy for Tchaikovsky to have turned this amusing piece of genre-bending into slapstick farce, and while there is<\/em> a fair share of slapstick in Spiderlight<\/em>, he manages to turn many openings for humour into something darker. For example, when Cyrene realises, some time after the event, that what she took for a fairly mindless sexual encounter has very different implications (\u201cI wasn\u2019t thinking that he couldn\u2019t say no\u201d), the humour\u2014and it\u2019s very dark indeed\u2014comes when Enth thanks her for not killing him, drawing our attention to the very different nature of arachnid sexual encounters.<\/p>\n

Despite this light and shade, it's certainly possible to read Spiderlight<\/em> as a lightly amusing deconstruction of the kind of fantasy we have all read too much of. At the end of the day, it\u2019s a guilty pleasure. We know where we\u2019re going, and we are happy to have a skilful guide to take us there. But if this novel is<\/em> play, it is thoughtful play. The last part of the book, in which we meet the Dark Lord and discover the spiritual \u201ccosmology\u201d of this world, is, on one level at least, evidence of the adage that fantasy is \u201cgood to think with,\u201d as China Mi\u00e9ville puts it in his \u201ceditorial introduction\u201d to Historical Materialism<\/em> 10, no. 4. We are focussed upon some quite fundamental examples of the way fantasy\u2014and not only fantasy, but our general ways of system-building\u2014\u201cthinks about\u201d the world as a structure of moral dualism.\u00a0I shall be vague about the ending, because what Tchaikovsky is giving us, important though it is, is more a chat than a lecture, more a nudge towards the obvious than a self-important declaration of moral certainty; but it will come as no surprise to the practiced reader of fantasy. What the novel leaves us with is a sense that maybe we should think for ourselves, which is perhaps the most important moral lesson we must be asked to study in these times.<\/p>\n
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Tchaikovsky might be back on familiar ground, but he is doing something more than giving his growing range of fans something that they have had already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":58489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/spiderlightcover.jpg?fit=975%2C1500&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p82q22-fdm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58488"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58515,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58488\/revisions\/58515"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}