Avrana Kern is aboard a spaceship orbiting high above a planet where she is overseeing her dream project: the creation of a planet. Technically, it is a terraforming project, but as she sees it, what is taking place is literally nothing less than the creation of a new future. The time is centuries after the Old Empire which had ruled Earth finally collapsed amidst one too many wars. In response, several deep space probes were launched with the intent of finding planets which could be terraformed into brand new worlds. One of those probes, of course, is that from which Kern is beginning to view herself in a dangerously godlike manner.
Everything is going as planned until Kern’s spaceship is attacked and she finds herself in the position of having to abandon the workers below and instead going with the option of infecting the entire planet with a nanovirus capable of speeding up the process of the “barrel of monkeys” with which she had populated the planet earlier. The narrative will proceed from there and essentially the bulk of the novel is an intense examination of the particulars and details of what happens when a god does play dice with the universe.
The mechanism driving the plot is the effects of that nanovirus on the animal life of the planet of the monkeys. Because, as it turns out, the monkeys would be just a fraction of the animal population and it wouldn’t have mattered otherwise because the monkeys that were sent never actually arrived. What animal life was abundant included spiders and ants, both of which seemed to be especially capable of evolutionary advancement thanks to the nanovirus. The narrative will proceed to split into two parallel stories, one of which follows the evolution of the ants and spiders that reflect the history of humanity in relating how a species which has acquired advanced intelligence goes from scrambling around close to the ground to taking their first tentative steps into space exploration.
The other story running parallel to that of the evolution of the insects takes place aboard a spaceship called the Gilgamesh. Because it is a parallel story, it must exist within the time long-form time frame as the evolution back on the planet. This is achieved by having the humans spend extended periods in suspended animation. This time frame also allows the story aboard the space ship to be more expansive so that it becomes a story of the ebb and flow of a society often in conflict with itself: there is time enough for political uprisings, emotional breakdowns, and the splitting off into opposing factions which mark the timeline of a society passing through generation change.
The difference here is that in order to maintain coherence, the story revolves around a handful of ever-present crew members like Commander Guyen, a kind of social historian named Holsten, chief engineer Lain and chief science offer Vitas. This stands in direct contrast to the story of the spiders which does include generation change among the spiders over the course of their evolution. Among the most important are Portia, warrior priestess and Fabian, a rebel leader.
The extended voyages of the spaceship is mandated by the response the Gilgamesh receives when it first makes contact with Arvana Kern and her world. It is that failure which sends the Gilgamesh off in search of other habitable planets requiring those extended periods of suspended animation. This is a necessity of plotting which allows the stories to continue running parallel with each other and also builds the suspense of the inevitable return back to Kern’s world after evolution has allowed the spiders to become capable of defending themselves while at the same time this vestige of humanity has lived outside of suspended animation long enough to age and become a devolved version of their former glory.
Roughly the last quarter of the book is devoted to that final climactic confrontation between humans aboard the spaceship and the spiders on the planet below. The spiders are determined to protect their planet against the human interlopers at all cost and the approach will ultimately depend upon their own mastery of controlling the very nanovirus which stimulated their advancement. An experiment in mutation to infect those aboard the Gilgamesh results in a very surprising ending to the conflict which is reflected many generations later in a new spaceship called Voyager which is bioengineered into an actual living entity sent out to explore new worlds and new civilizations created from a combination of interspecies cooperation.
