I've read several other works by Adrian Tchaikovsky and have gone back to read this one. Gotta say I enjoyed it tremendously.
The world building is done pretty quickly but really works if you are willing to buy in--the big leap is a nanovirus that will drive evolution and brain development in a species. I especially enjoyed the nod to David Brin's Uplift series--and the fact that the book took the concept in a new direction.The plot summary you can get from other reviews. Some things that stood out for me:
1. Tchaikovsky does a nice job of taking the spiders' perspective without getting so awkwardly alien as to be difficult to read. One of the things he does that is very telling is to have continuity in the spiders' names over generations and even millenia. They're all Portia, Bianca, or Viola (females) or Fabian (male). It gives you the real sense that spiders have a different idea of identity than humans, and it informs their motivations. But in other ways they form a hierarchical society and fight just like humans do.
2. Some people felt like the middle section got long-winded. I think they missed some things. The spiders fended off two existential threats to their civilization, both of which changed them thoroughly. The humans visited a second terraformed planet and fought to keep their creaky, hastily built ark ship alive. We got an extended view of the contrast between the spiders' generational changes and the central core of human characters, which did not change because they spent extended periods in cold sleep.
In all my reviews of Adrian Tchaikovsky's work, I highlight the bit in his bio about being trained in stage fighting. You can see this in the construction of his plots, never more clearly than in this book. We have early indicators that there will be conflict. The initial clash with the remnant of Dr. Arvada Kern. The enemies separate and regroup, each following their own dramatic path. They come together for the final conflict, including various reversals of fortune. It makes for very exciting reading. Not all of his books work like this--he has several novellas that tell stories in different ways--but his large scale series do seem to follow this pattern.
