Book: Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children Of Time"

My fifteenth book of the year was a return to the space opera genre.   Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" was one of the better books I've read this year so far.

The book is hard to summarize as it doesn't follow a standard path but I'll give it a go.  At the height of humanities technological progress they are terraforming planets to make new homes for humans and, in this case, to create new humans.  Soon after, a massive attack by luddite, non-expansionists start a war that nearly destroys the human race.  During the first shots of the war, an attempt to introduce primates onto a newly terraformed planet goes wrong.  The primates do not make it to the planet but the nano-viruses, made to rapidly evolve the primates, do make it to the surface.

Jump ahead several hundred years and the remnants of humanity leave a dying Earth in an ark ship carrying thousands of humans in stasis.  Following terraforming maps discovered in the wreckage of the old empire the ark ship arrives at the terraformed planet.

There they discover that the nano-virus has evolved spiders and ants to sentience.  The rest of the book is a  struggle between the survival of humanity and the survival of the spiders.  The book comes to an interesting and unexpected conclusion which felt satisfying.

I gave this book four stars out of five on Goodreads.  There are two more books ... more sequels I believe ... that continue the story.  I enjoyed this book enough I expect I will be reading these books too.