Children of Time
Children of Time is absolutely fantastic journey for all lovers of original science fiction stories, especially of space opera and planetary romance variety. This novel is filled to brim with interesting ideas. Avid readers of science fiction could, perhaps, find echoes of this ideas in some older works of the genre (nothing is new under the sun), but Adrian Tchaikovsky manages to blend them in unique and compelling way. In the end we get epic saga of countless generations of intelligent spiders' growing civilization - and not so countless generations of humans, who strive to survive after long collapse of their own civilization. There is also lone old semi-immortal woman turned AI satellite and god figure of spiders, who is making trouble for humans with accessing planet.
Idea at the heart of the story is slow uplift of tiny spider into intelligent, civilized species during astounding number of generations through means of carefully designed nanovirus. You see, the nanovirus was designed by older human civilization to uplift apes to populate this planet, as a means of experiment or terraforming attempt. Things went awry in the meantime, apes and old human civilization didn't survive, leaving nanovirus to its own devices.
As an effect, we get to see development of civilization of the spiders. The book paints the picture of civilization which is going into completely different direction than our own to great effect. It is very convincing with that, slowly unfolding idea after idea. Spiders end up creating civilization that runs on different principles than are familiar to us - controlling ant colonies through chemical-pheromones as chief among them. Their different biology leads their society not only to development of alternative path of technology, but also of different culture, norms and politics. For example, at some point small males start to have some ridiculous radical ideas, like that maybe they are intellectual equals to females, or that maybe they shouldn't be eaten after intercourse!
In order to present that huge timespans, the story presents us multiple generations of characters who share name and lineage. It didn't work for me, because seeing characters with the same name from the same descent all the time, and them always being ones at the center of change strained believability and was unnecessary confusing.
On the other side of narrative are humans. They are descendants of humanity who managed to survive from near extinction. Interestingly, there are subtle clues that they are quite different from us. Previously mentioned woman of old civilization doesn't consider them the same species as her (although she's quite unreliable point of view). Concept that I loved was so-called historians, who in contrast to our own imaginings of the profession hiding behind this name in our times, they are in fact more like physicists-engineers trying to decode information and technology of old advanced civilization of their ancestors. Their ages-spanning attempts to settle on the planet and overcome protective satellite.
This is a book which is not only full of wonderful ideas, but also of grippling narrative that weave its two main threads together at the end into something bigger.