Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky

If I was ever afraid of spiders, and I am, I'm even more afraid of them now. I am asking the scientists not to play! Spiders are not supposed to be highly intelligent space-traveling beings.

The earth is dying. The Brynn Two team, led by Dr. Avran Kern, works to terraform planets in order to save the human race. And just as they were nearing their goal, Murphy intervened in their plans. Instead of monkeys, the nanovirus settles into spiders.

Thousands of years later, the earth is destroyed, and the ark-ship Gilgamesh arrives at the green planet of Dr. Kern. And again Murphy takes matters into his own hands.
The novel is written from two perspectives, human and evolutionary spiders.
People are almost stereotypical. They are looking for a way to save humanity by populating one of the planets that the Old Empire terraformed. And even in the relentless race against time, when their survival is at stake, the worst in man comes to the surface. People fight among themselves. Everyone has their own vision of what the new world and the new society should look like and they don't want to budge, even though their lives are in danger and the mission is in question...
During all that time, spiders evolve. They use the advantages that the nanovirus gave them. Spiders build cities, make machines, learn, read, write, create a human-like society. They also have human traits, the worst ones of course, but with the help of nanoviruses they manage to overcome them and build a normal and functional society.
The journey of the people and the progress of the spiders lead to an interesting ending to this very interesting novel. In the end, I got what I was waiting for 400 and a half pages - A SPACE BATTLE!!! And what kind, gods and aliens. Exciting, totally crazy and totally unexpected...
The ending is the icing on the cake that the nanovirus whipped up with a little help from mastermind Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I was particularly impressed by the technical details about the functioning of the ship in space, the suspension chambers that allow people to sleep and cover huge distances both in time and space, communication between spiders, transfer of knowledge through Perception...

By now, everyone knows that epic fantasy is my drug, but I always like to read good SF novel as well. Which Children of Time certainly is. It has everything that, in my opinion, a good novel should have - a strong story that pulls in and makes you think and interesting characters (one small interesting thing - the spiders are very well written, so well that it was easier to connect with them than with human characters ).

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