This was a huge letdown and I have been trying all day to figure out why. I think in the end it’s kind of death by a thousand cuts. It did lots of things competently, but nothing particularly well, and the sum of it all is unsatisfying and forgettable. It’s a watered-down imitation of much better books.

The story alternates between a group of humans that might be the last of the species travelling through space looking for a new and secure home, and a new society made up of hyper-evolved spiders on a lush planet that might be the humans’ last resort.

We follow the evolution of the spider society over thousands of years and the humans not long after the collapse of society on Earth, which took with it a lot of knowledge and technology. I made several attempts to summarize a little more of the setup, but each time it read sillier than the last. It’s a complicated, somewhat nonsensical premise that works better the less you think about it.

Tchaikovsky reminds me of Andy Weir as a writer — he’s got some interesting and well-thought out ideas, but no sense of storytelling, character or subtlety. And the whole thing falls apart with the slightest bit of scrutiny.

The part of the story focused on the spiders was never that compelling for me. None of them felt any deeper than an early-2000’s era video game character, and the stakes were never really established. The setup for that story was promising, but the way it unfolded was painfully dull. The exploration of inequality and caste was superficial and shallow — a huge missed opportunity.

The human story was much worse. Not a single three-dimensional character. A bunch of cartoon villains, and the one renaissance man that stumbles around making irrational decisions, with no sense of development or progression. It’s tempting to try to deconstruct the author’s choices around the humans, but probably not useful.

All tell, no show. So much of the story takes place in dialogue, or in bland exposition. In a lot of ways, the book felt like classic-era sci-fi, but without the bold themes, radical ideas or social critique that makes the classics classics.