SPIDERWORLD
Colin Wilson
The Tower
The time is the twenty-fifth century and earth lies in the thrall of the Spider Lord. The remnants of mankind are living in burrows trying to survive the fear-probes and incursions of gigantic spiders. Young Niall grows up amid the starkly beautiful desert landscape, grubbing for food and water, observing the coming and goings of the spider patrols. They drift overhead in immense silken balloons, on the lookout for the stray pockets of human beings, whom they breed for food, yet still fear because they recognise that they possess special qualities of intelligence which could enable them to regain dominance of the earth. The novel traces Niall's growing awareness of the latent telepathic powers inside him. He travels to the city of Dira and on the way back kills a death spider. This marks him down as a formidable adversary. He infiltrates the city of the spiders where he meets allies in the form of Bill Doggins, honorary beetle, and Odina, spider servant and honey-haired heroine whose violent death concludes the narrative. Unlike the spiders, the equally important beetle faction find men fascinating and are aesthetically entranced by homo sapiens ability to concoct memorably beautiful explosions. In a white tower, Niall finds the computer which provides him a crash course in human history, from Sumeria to Hiroshima, and he learns how the comet Opik passed by the earth, tweaking the tail of evolution and boosting the stature of arachnoids. His task now is to restore the status of mankind, and we will learn how this comes about in the second volume.
This is absolutely different from the rest of Wilson's opus, invoking shades of Bulwer Lytton's 'Vril', the Rider Haggard of 'She' and of David Lindsay's 'Voyage to Arcturus'. Here be spiders galore, nature mysticism, bone-bare landscapes, exotic bestiaries and mythologies, lightly handled interludes of sensuality, plus lots of nasty maggotty details demonstrating the ruthless voracity of life in Spiderworld. The fantasy genre has injected rocket-bursts of poetry and elation into Wilson's normally utilitarian style, and the pace and power are sustained to the galloping finish. This bizarrely original and intellectually alert feat of literary stamina deserves a respectful salute, and no doubt Spiderworld will take its place alongside those fabled Xanadus of the mind: Middle Earth, Gormenghast, Helliconia and Never-Never Land.
(from a review in Abraxas)