A haunting green island. A stand of trees known as the Golden Grove. In the moonlit darkness, the webs gleam faintly, stirring in the warm night breeze. Arachne and the women sit at their looms around the Grove, weaving tapestries from the silk of the golden spiders, tapestries of life and time, clarity and light, the pattern of their world... But the Grove is dying. The spiders are sick—their offspring disfigured, their webs malformed. The mysterious aura is waning, the peace and harmony fading. Shadow falls over Island, strange ships are seen on the horizon, and Arachne fears that the pattern is about to change...forever.
Author
Nancy Kress is an American science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo and Nebula-winning 1991 novella Beggars in Spain which was later expanded into a novel with the same title. In addition to her novels, Kress has written numerous short stories and is a regular columnist for Writer's Digest. She is a regular at Clarion writing workshops and at The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland. During the Winter of 2008/09, Nancy Kress is the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany. Excerpted from Wikipedia.
