Overview
A terraforming project abandoned in humanity's collapse leaves behind a nano-virus meant to uplift monkeys on a distant world. The monkeys were never delivered. Instead, the virus finds the local jumping spiders, and over the next ten millennia those spiders build a civilisation. Meanwhile, the last remnant of humanity, in a decaying generation ship, is heading for the same planet.
The alternating structure. Chapters on the spider civilisation as it evolves generation by generation, chapters on the human ship where a scientist called Holsten wakes up from cold-storage every century or so to translate ancient records. Should be a gimmick. It isn't. The spiders' chapters cover ten thousand years of philosophy, religion, war, art. Tchaikovsky commits so fully that by the end you are rooting for the spiders and dreading the arrival of the humans.
The last hundred pages contain some of the most tense first-contact scenes in modern SF. The final decision the two civilisations arrive at is one of the least predictable and most satisfying resolutions in the genre. The sequel, Children of Ruin, is nearly as good; the third, Children of Memory, is the weakest of the three but still strong.
