Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I am a confirmed arachnophobe, I have removed myself from rooms because of a spider the size of a raisin, so a novel whose heroes are uplifted spiders growing steadily more intelligent across millennia, I was not best pleased to find out how much I would be reading about spiders doing spidery things. I persisted. And it was amazing. Tchaikovsky tells a story from two primary perspectives, human and non-human.
On one clock, a scientist wants to populate a planet with monkeys and a nano-virus supposed to uplift them, by hastening their evolution towards intelligence, except the monkeys never made it to the surface of the planet. The virus did. What it found were spiders, and we watch, generation by generation, a spider civilization claw its way from instinct to language to science, and the spiders have the same few names throughout the generations, but it helps with continuity, so the bold hunter/leader/priestess is always called Portia, the too-clever-for-her-own-good sexy scientist is always Bianca and the trickster male is always Fabian.
And it worked on me?? My skepticism turned into amazement and excitement, and, gotta love Fabian, the little male trickster, little guy was emotional, this underdog you end up cheering for. On the other clock, the last humans, refugees sleeping in cryogenic coffins, the ship's precious "cargo" looks for a viable outpost to call home, being frozen over centuries to wake up and argue amongst themselves to the point of having mutiny, degrading and feuding, steering toward that same green world thinking it is theirs, unaware the spiders below now worship the guardian satellite as a god, so she becomes an object of worship to the creatures below while the scientist thinks she is communicating with the descendants of the original monkeys, not the spiders, a satellite that actually holds the uploaded scientist Kern, driven mad by all the years of cryo-stasis and solitude, her mind merged with an AI.
What got me is how patiently he builds their alien society: the use of ants as a computing engine, their chemical language, maintaining fundamentally arachnid approaches to thinking, communicating and living, and the way the males, routinely eaten after mating and treated as disposable, exist in a spider society that is female-dominated, where males are essentially slaves, until one uses it as a chip to bargain for a better lot for his gender. It never feels like a costume, he's created real, believable characters with a non-human point of view, a society vastly more alien than 99% of actual aliens in SF. The human sections are weaker, often pretty bleak, Holsten a classicist who studied languages is a fine sad everyman but he was ever an outsider, and passive to the point of absurdity, and the ship politics get repetitive, a colony ship that has a mutiny after thousands of years....ugh, just boring. Even if the human storyline is nothing special, does not matter. The ending just blew me away. Really wasn't expecting it, and the answer at the end was an emotionally satisfying surprise, a resolution where it's not a typical conquering triumph that so many sci-fi tales employ, one earned by five hundred pages of patient evolution. After a while you kind of forget that these characters are spiders at all, and by the end I found the palp twitching, leg stomping spiders to be almost endearing, this puppy had me rooting for arachnids, a book that reached into my oldest fear and made me care. That is a lot.