Children of Time

The monkey motif emphasizes the evolutionary arc for both humans and spiders. Kern refers to the humans on the Gilgamesh as monkeys, saying, “You are not my humanity. You are monkeys, nothing but monkeys” (97). Kern also becomes obsessed with the concept of her creation on the planet as monkeys—so much so that she struggles to properly communicate with her creation. Her private contemplations reveal this bias, as when she muses, “The monkeys had their own ideas, and such strange ideas […] Monkeys were supposed to be the easy first step to a universe of uplift” (452). Notably, when Holsten reflects on the progress of humanity throughout time, he also equates humans to monkeys. While the spiders are always spiders, they evolve well beyond their mindless hunter-based origins and approach everything with a willingness to engage in creative forms of problem-solving. By contrast, the humans are still, in many ways, no more than monkeys who are simply trying to survive and to either dominate or destroy all that they fail to understand.

Architecture is a symbol for the physical and abstract structures of society, and for the internal structures of the individuals that make up the spider and human species.