Holsten is the closest thing to a human protagonist in the novel. Holsten’s instincts as a scholar push him to try to see things from a different perspective than that of those around him. He is a classicist who specializes in the languages and cultures of the Old Empire—Avrana Kern’s culture and the culture that destroyed the Earth’s ecology. He acts as a witness not just to the history of humanity, but also to its present predicaments, and he is regularly struck by the moral failings of the humans around him. Tchaikovsky chooses to show the progression of humanity through Holsten’s eyes, and it is therefore through Holsten’s eyes that the humans first directly encounter the spiders. As the narrative states, “When his gaze strayed to the two large eyes that made up so much of its front, he felt an unbearable shock of connection, as though it was trespassing on territory he had only ever shared with another human being before” (224-225). Holsten’s immediate impression of the spider’s sentience suggests that he alone holds a level of empathy that no other human manages to reach independently.

Holsten is also the progenitor of the generations of humans that are bonded to the spiders through the virus.