Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This was a re-read to get back into the series.
Good god this was a fun read, exactly as unputdownable as I remember it. It has all the things I love in a sci-fi series: great scientific ideas, things to say about our past and present, alien point of views, good prose, incredible pace, a few good action scenes, a satisfactory ending if you don't want to read more books.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is a fantastic writer, he reads modern but with a classic Clarke vibe. He clearly has great knowledge of the science behind this story (zoology) and he has incredible ideas about how a race of uplifted spiders would evolve from hunters to space-faring. But he doesn't stop at technology, he imagines how their society would organise, their gender politics, their relationships with other species, how they react to being invaded by aliens (humans) and to literally meeting their maker. It's a tremendous feat of imagination. Also, reading it in 2026 makes me realise how prescient some of the book's ideas were about AI (the book was originally published in 2015).
I really enojyed the structure of the book, it continually draws parallelisms and juxtapositions between humans and spiders and it solves the large timescale with cleverly positioned hibernations for humans and new generations for spiders. I also loved how there is no real "evil", the bad guys are either mindless ants or people that get part of their humanity eroded by the (very dire) circumstances.
I can't wait to read the rest of the series.