Comment by GordonS
5 hours ago
I have a spider phobia, and struggled not to put the book down at first!
But the concepts and writing are excellent... really engaging stuff. And by the end of the book I'd learned so much about spiders that I honestly felt less scared of them! Definitely not cured by any means, but a year on and I still fear them less than I used to.
I’ve only read the first one. My main thought was ‘I wish he could write people as well as he could write spiders’ :)
I think humans and spiders and octopus and viruses are for him just a background for the object he wants to narrate. In difference to many other fiction where the persons are the objects. I also missed a human part of it.
If you want more spiders from him (actually, a spider-man), in a fantasy setting, I recommend Spiderlight. Just a fun novella that feels like a D&D campaign, works great as a palate cleanser.
I find his writing style really enjoyable, to the point that I really need to dive into his entire repertoire now.
Unsurprisingly, Tchaikovsky is a tabletop gamer and his first series, Shadows of the Apt, was derived from a game he GMed in college.
And I agree, everything hes written has been worth reading.
I had much the same experience, coming out of it with much less fear about jumping spiders in particular. Now they don't really bother me.
Didn't really do much for all the other species though!