u/boiledrainbow

1. The spiders in Children of Time harvest and breed vast colonies of ants. They map their pheromone trails to act as logic gates. Millions of ants function as an organic supercomputer, capable of calculating orbital mechanics.

2. LOVs in Limit of Vision are multicellular organisms that can be implanted. They exponentially increase cognitive capabilities, and function as self-evolving processors.

3. Noocytes in Blood Music use DNA strands as a self-replicating biological hard drive. This way, they form a distributed bio-computer that possesses a higher processing power than a human brain.

4. The Edenist faction in The Night's Dawn grow Voidhawk spaceships made of animal and human neural networks. They are handled by a telepathic internet through which people can download information instantly.

I'm so glad the book got long-litsed for Booker Prize. The book is written beautifully, but paints a painful and bleak picture. I love that the book doesn't really take the easy route and offer some childish optimism or whatever. it just grabs your face and shoves it in some blackcurrant pie of an invasive apocalypse. I felt like the book (slight spoilers) is getting us to think of ourselves as the invaders, by making us experience the invaders with absolutely no context. Also, the book is so goddamn random. Like a full on fever dream. It's also so suddenly darkly funny out of nowhere, and then returns to serious philosophy. Very surreal.

I seriously hope it wins. Considering that Prophet Song won recently, it certainly feels like speculative fiction is making it big in the Bookers how horror is making it to the Oscars finally.