Spider World - The Tower

Colin Wilson’s Spider World: The Tower returns to a future Earth where humanity has been demoted from “dominant species” to “nervous snack with language.” Giant spiders now rule the planet, which is one of those arrangements that makes one look back on ordinary civilisation, with all its taxes and plumbing, almost fondly. Humans survive in hiding, beneath notice, beneath ground, beneath dignity, trying not to become part of the local food chain with too much ceremony.

This volume follows Niall and the strange, dangerous ascent from the human underworld into the terrifying structures of the spider civilisation. The Tower itself is exactly the sort of thing one does not want giant spiders to have: vast, organised, mysterious, vertical, and suggestive of a species that has moved well beyond “lurking in corners” and into architecture, hierarchy and long-term planning. A spider in the bath is bad enough. A spider empire with buildings is civilisation filing a complaint against evolution.

Wilson’s future is wonderfully unpleasant because it takes a common human horror and gives it politics. The spiders are not merely large monsters wandering about being fangy for the sake of it. They have power, intelligence, social order and an entire world arranged around their supremacy. Humans are the diminished ones now, carrying memories, myths and scraps of courage through a landscape that no longer recognises them as important. The old species arrogance has been folded up and stored somewhere damp.

There is a pleasing irony in the human role reversal. After ages of treating other creatures as resources, nuisances or supper, mankind has become the small scuttling thing trying to avoid notice. The philosophical point is not hidden behind the webbing. We built cities, declared dominion, named the animals, and then in Wilson’s cheerful nightmare the spiders came back with management experience. One can hardly call it fair, but it does have a certain administrative neatness.

The book mixes quest, survival, speculative evolution, pulp adventure and Wilson’s taste for big, strange ideas. It has hidden societies, perilous journeys, psychic and biological oddness, oppressed humanity, vast insectile overlords and that slightly feverish 1980s paperback energy where the cover alone seems to say, “yes, this may be ridiculous, but you are absolutely going to read the next chapter.” The result is classic cult science fantasy: grim, imaginative, odd, and deeply committed to making legs a problem.

For readers of vintage science fiction, post-human futures, giant-creature nightmares, Colin Wilson completists, or anyone who thinks civilisation would be improved by fewer arachnids in senior positions, Spider World: The Tower is fine shelf material. It continues the saga of human survival in a world where the ceiling has too many eyes and the ruling class can walk on it.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid Grafton paperback, ready for the SF shelf, the spider shelf, or preferably the shelf slightly above eye level where it can’t creep up on anyone.

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