Adrian Tchaikovsky apparently has a thing for spiders. This 2016 book, formerly available only as a UK import, is a magnificently imaginative space opera about the last remnants of humanity's diaspora to the stars, who believe they've found their new Eden—a terraformed planet perfectly suited to human life—until they discover another batch of colonists (of the massive, fiendishly intelligent, eight-legged variety) is also vying for a spot at the top of the food chain. It's a novel that once again proves the author a master at manipulating familiar elements of the genre (generation ships, cryosleep, truly alien civilizations), while injecting his own brand of venomous originality—due to the colony world's ideal environment, the spider race evolves at an accelerated rate, allowing us to witness entire epochs of its history, from squishable bugs to a space-faring civilization to be reckoned with, in the span of a few hundred idea-packed pages.
This post was also published on the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog.
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