Children of Time

One of the best books I've ever read. When it comes to science fiction, there's a lot of the same out there. Tchaikovsky writes an entirely original story with amazing characters - not all human.

The premise is this: Earth is in the process of terraforming a new planet to make it habitable. The plan is to contaminate this new world with a genetic virus that will cause the monkies there to become more sentient in the far future. Something goes wrong (we're still in chapter 1 here) and instead a planet of insects are grown.

The most impressive part of this entire story is the focus on insect chemistry and what it would look like for a planet of intelligent spiders to rise. They face many of the same issues we do in our society today - gender rights (although the main issue is to allow males to NOT be eaten after mating), societal structures, trust, communication and math. The approach to solving these issues is entirely insect based, and some of them blew my mind.