Sentient spiders as protagonists?? As soon as I heard that, I knew I had to read a book with a premise that whacky. That and, it’s by Tchaikovsky, whose misery-fest-of-a-book Cage of Souls was absolutely delightful in a way that only tortured souls like myself can understand. And who has the zoology chops to pull off a book like this, to help you actually get into the perspective of totally other life forms.

So anyways: yes: spiders. I know. But listen, really. He really masterfully thought through what a civilization would be like, its different levels as it advances through the ages, and how they would communicate differently, think differently, and form different gender roles and different hierarchies in their society because of their underlying biology and evolution. Masterful is the only word for it.

And I found myself actually caring about these (believe it or not!) spider characters. And you just might too.

There are also some interesting plot things going on with the humans, who are seriously messed up in the head, I have to say. Different megalomaniacs and brilliant people starved of sunlight and anything good and natural for generations on these worldships, and their society descending into barbarism…and a few of their leaders making themselves live forever with cryosleep…developing a mythos and cult around them…wow. Quite interesting. Merging organic consciousness with artificial intelligence…really great stuff in here.

Please don’t let the spiders turn you off. Give it a try, honestly, because Adrian Tchaikovsky is in my opinion one of the most brilliant worldbuilding minds in science fiction out there today. He’s an global treasure, an expert in zoology, and he will teach you way more about animals and evolution than you’ll learn in any other science fiction book. Same can be said for Cage of Souls, which also had some interesting ideas about evolution. Tchaikovsky is a seriously underrated author. For my taste at least.

I should mention that I think his characters are perhaps not for everyone. They are frequently miserable souls, bewildered, uncertain, tortured, surrounded by sociopaths and narcissists and various other assorted chocolates insane people on all sides…the protagonists’ nobility lies in them being relatively normal and not being terrible people compared to those around them. They’re just trying to survive, mostly. But they’re also intelligent. Thank God for protagonists that don’t advance the plot through being morons! Thank you. So yes, his protagonists really work for me.

I don’t know how it is that I never managed to give this a review at the time that I read it a few months ago! Funny how that works sometimes: when I’m blazing through a book to get to the finish line because it’s so good, then after I get there, I take a break from thinking about it. But then later in following weeks, it comes back for me to think about.

For this book, it’s the spiders I think about a lot, all the challenges they overcome (it’s really like their civilization itself is a hero that you want to triumph). And I think particularly about their interesting cities, which are basically skyscrapers built on massive trees, with huge vast webs connecting them. Their tech tree evolves so much differently than ours; they never invented the wheel but they got to radios and lasers way faster than we did.

I really can’t wait to read the rest of this series. There’s the fate of the human race hanging in the balance. This isn’t much of a spoiler really, more like just the premise of the whole dang trilogy, but basically the humans have run out of options and the one planet that’s looking good and inhabitable is also the one with the giant spider civilization. Spoilers ahead but: in the first book they have a brief encounter; basically it’s a horror scene for the humans. It’s great. In the second book it looks like there’s going to be a lot more interaction between the two civilizations and I can’t wait to see what happens. And/or explore other planets/colonies as well, not sure if that’s coming.

Just read the book.