Children of Time

Tchaikovsky's novel runs two timelines against each other: a terraforming experiment gone sideways, in which an uplift virus meant for monkeys instead accelerates the evolution of a colony of jumping spiders across thousands of generations, and a dying-Earth ark ship of cryonically frozen humans searching for a new home. The spider civilization is the book's real achievement — Tchaikovsky builds an alien social structure around web-based communication, chemical signaling, and matriarchal hierarchy that never resorts to humans-in-costume shorthand, and lets the reader watch a genuinely non-human intelligence develop its own science, religion, and politics in parallel with human collapse. The novel's patience with evolutionary time scales, jumping forward generations at a stretch, is unusual for space opera and is what won it the Arthur C. Clarke Award.