Definitely an outstanding science fiction novel. Negatives first: It is informationally dense. This 600 page book took me 13 hours to get through according to my ereader, but I will be honest, I think that's a lowball estimate. Its alternating POVs are very much the point, but they interfered with both absorption and readability for me; I was never absorbed enough to make it through more than a chapter at a time. The omniscient narrator in the spider chapters was a curious, jarring choice, though at the end of the book I understood the narrator's position in the story, which did improve the choice for me considerably. The spider POV pretty much had to be *translated* into human terms; I wondered throughout if there was a better way to render this translation, and by the end I don't think there was. I agree with the choices, but there was still enough of a barrier there that I was never truly absorbed by the book.

Now listen. I am going to reread this in two years and it's going to blow me the fuck away and it's going to become a 5-star read. I already have the second book reserved at the library, which I hear is even more cerebral and will probably be even more work to get through. I look forward to it. I will ration it into little cheez-it sized portions and savour it in 30-minute bursts over three weeks. Science fiction like this is worth the work it takes to read.

This book's foremost asset is its parallel structure. Divided into 7 parts (plus prologue and epilogue), alternating chapters describe the same social phenomenon (e.g., ascension; civil war; innovation) among the remaining human population aboard the ark ship Gilgamesh and the spider population on Kern's world, which has been accidentally elevated by a previous generation of humans attempting to elevate monkeys on a colony world. This structure enables the reader to truly conceive of the spider society as sentient, on equal footing with humanity, despite its considerable (and well described) differences. By the time the inevitable conflict between the societies arises, the reader's loyalty is wholesale divided. This is the true feat of this book: it asks you to consider if, on the cosmic scale, humans might not be expendable—something rarely done in science fiction, particularly colonization sci fi.

This book tackles themes of war, inheritance, technology, kinship, evolution, and genocide. It deals with the passage of millennia with fascinating intent. It imagines new knowledge and language systems, reinvents what we think of as weaponry. It epitomizes "speculative" fiction. It cannot possibly be accused of being poorly thought out on any metric, making only intentional choices. The characters are held at a bit of a distance because it is a book intentionally focused on worldbuilding and events; it does what it set out to do with absolute magnificence.

Meeting it where it is, it's probably a near-perfect read. It's a model of what good science fiction can achieve. But damn, it just wasn't immersive for me. I never found rhythm in the reading experience. That said, the payoff was fantastic and I teared up at the end. If nothing else, this book is an incredible achievement.