Trans Megathread for the Week of 2025-01-06 to 2025-01-12 - Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time is a 2015 science fiction novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

In the distant future, humanity seeks to create new habitats for itself on distant planets, terraforming them and seeding them with life. Dr. Avrana Kern is heading one such project, orbiting the tentatively named "Kern's World", where the plan is to release monkeys le-monke infected with a nanovirus that will accelerate their evolution. Through an act of sabotage from an anti-technology group that has also destroyed much of Earth, the monkeys are never released, and the virus instead infects a species of spider, Portia labiata. The book follows the evolution of the spiders and their eventual civilisation, as well as a remnant of humanity that fled to Kern's World hoping to find paradise.

also children of ruin and children of memory, the sequels, are really good

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Musicals have been associated with queer culture for a long time, but I don't feel that they really hold that much space in trans communities? I've seen people here talk about musicals but no more or less than non-queer folks.

Is this right? Like, I feel like our cultural touchstones are pretty different.
- I think musicals are mostly associated with a pre-trans/proto-trans homomasculine feminity. The type of queenery that was the expression for trans womanhood without the framework to understand itself fully or the acceptance to be fully embodied. Now, I think it's mostly historical inertia.
  
  ---like think about Peaches from 'Stone Butch Blues' who the narrator refers to as a 'drag queen' who we would now obviously understand as a trans woman. Theater, drag, and musicals especially were a space where more expansive gender expression were possible and consequently took up a lot of gay cultural focus.
  
  crypto-homo crypto-trans homomasculine feminity. The type of queenery that was the expression for trans womanhood without the framework to understand itself fully or the acceptance to be fully embodied
  
  You're operating on levels of queer vocabulary previously thought unachievable
  
  we out here ig

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