I've just finished the audiobook version of Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky and it blew my silk socks off.
I'm going straight into massive spoilers on this one, so I'll hide it behind a jump.
-The book is primarily split into 2 stories that eventually converge: super-evolved giant sentient jumping spiders, and a planet-less "Ark-ship" of mostly-frozen humans.
The humans roam looking for a new planet and we see glimpses of their lives through the eyes of one character as he is awoken for brief periods over centuries. This in itself was pretty interesting scifi, but then we have the spiders.
Oh my god the spiders.
I found myself impatient during each human chapter, dying to get to the next spider chapter. We watch them evolve and grow and have ideas. The author spins out an alternative history of technological advancement through biological means -- ant factories, spider hackers, gender politics as cultural advancements questions the killing of male spiders after mating.
It was legitimately some of the most interesting reading I've done in a while. I was gripped to see the next spider generation, the next technological leap and corresponding spider drama. Subterfuge! Romance! War!
All the while contrasted against the humans as they squabble and do human things, struggling to eke out an existence upon their ship. I did really like the two main human characters and their chemistry -- they were just terribly overshadowed by what was going on in spiderland.
I can't say I was terribly fond of how the book ended or the philosophical message behind it, but the clash between the spiders and humans definitely drove home how horrific these meter long techno-spiders would be to normal humans after lovingly listening to their stories for so many hours.
I'm launching directly into book 2 of the series, though I don't have much hope for the sequels to match up to this novel, which I feel may just be a must-read modern scifi novel.