Children of Time

You've got Dr. Avrana Kern of the technologically advanced Old Empire, seeking to terraform planets and seed them with an evolutionary accelerating nano-virus. Her efforts are stymied by the escalating conflicts back home on Earth that manages to corrupt her mission, forcing her to upload her consciousness to an orbiting satellite where she grapples with her own sanity over the ensuing millennia. Meanwhile the nano-virus ends up infecting spiders, the planned primates completely destroyed on arrival. We follow the spider civilization through the millennia as they advance through their own dark ages, renaissance, and technological revolutions.

Meanwhile, thousands of years after the wars that devastated the Earth, a new era of human discovery sets out on cannibalized technology from the Old Empire. The Gilgamesh and its host of explorers, kept ageless in cryostasis, are out looking for new world to inhabit. Victims of their own infighting, living on a ship that is crumbling around them even as new generations are born and die on board, they're running out of time to find this habitable world.

The chapters flip back and forth between these two worlds. Even as centuries slip by the pace is breakneck as we head to the inevitable collision of civilizations. Along the way we explore the nature of godhood and religious fervour, interspecies communication that extends beyond the interpreting of sounds, the fight for male spider rights, world ending game theory, and how people are just the worst.

As the first book of a trilogy, Children of Time stands on its own as a fantastic, award-winning read with a wonderfully satisfying ending that is up there as one of my favourite sci-fi reads of all time.