wednesday reading with spiders

Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky. This was pretty much my reading for the week. This book is doing some interesting structural things. Half of the story is set among the spiders, who, though large and superintelligent, still have shorter life spans than humans, and half is set on a slower-than-light human spaceship, with the main characters spending most of the timespan in suspension. So on the one hand you get to see the entire history of spider civilization (the gender stuff I was complaining about earlier gets more nuanced as you get to see how gender roles change over time), and on the other hand have humans who are alive through the whole thing.

The spider side of the story has much more nifty worldbuilding, and on the whole I cared for them more than for the humans, though I did find both parts to have genuinely moving bits, even if the book didn't generate super-strong feels on the whole. I was able to pick up enough hints to have a good idea of where the ending was going. Some similarities to the Three-Body Problem trilogy, but with a better answer and without the gender fail.