I hate arachnids, and I mean that plainly, the shape of their bodies and how they move gives me the shivers on a normal day, and this book made me root wildly for them anyway. That’s the whole trick of Children of Time. Tchaikovsky spends three thousand years of in-world time building a genuinely alien, inhuman civilization out of uplifted spiders, and by the second half you’re invested in their politics and their wars the same way you would any human empire.
Some people call this a biologist’s science fiction book and I’d push back on that a little, it’s a sociologist’s book just as much, the evolutionary worldbuilding on the spider side runs in careful parallel with the last remnants of humanity stranded on an ark ship, and the two threads are doing the same kind of civilizational thinking from opposite starting points. That’s the part that stuck with me longest, not the spiders themselves but watching two completely different intelligences arrive at some of the same institutional problems.
It’s trope-laden at the start and inevitable by the ending, I won’t pretend the shape of the story is a surprise, but the details along the way are fresh enough that the familiar arc doesn’t matter. A brilliant epic, and long, if you don’t like spiders going in this may be a genuine problem for the first hundred pages before the book earns your investment.
Up there with the best space opera I own. I may end up rereading this one, which isn’t something I say about many books this length.