I like and dislike this book for its pacing. Some of the time jumps for the human-side of things are almost snuck into a paragraph like "oh, btw, we pulled you out of cryo slumber and it's been another couple centuries." making it unnecessarily "hard" to follow the Guyen arc, but the spider arc is so cool. I'm also a little bit disappointed in it though because the first couple chapters are really good about explaining the evolutionary process – wish we got more of that rather than just "oh and now the spiders can modulate radio frequencies btw." Just seems like a bit of a jump from "what if I allied with this other spider rather than killing and fucking him, not necessarily in that order" (which, for the record I thought was very enjoyable narration). Though I guess it's like a "show you once," and it's understood that that's how technological evolution would happen for all these other inventions. It just doesn't clearly communicate what the constraints of the spider society are. Seems like they have no power ceiling whereas the human arc is capped by neuralink upload more or less. Dunno, oddly specific nit, good story, looking forward to the rest

Doesn't quite dive into Game Theory as much as e.g. The Dark Forest, but I do like the resolution of the prisoners' dilemma game with Hume's solution. Once again left grasping for a bit more details. Ambiguous ending/cliff hanger for book 2 is one thing, but I think it's just Tchaikovsky's style which is ehhhh for me thru book 1

Agree with Alex that the first story is more compelling, but the sub-story of CoRuin is better. Some the characters in book 2 are super cool, some of them seem to serve no purpose at all (which is more noticeable in a book where named character's are few, and each has distinct characteristics. Violet, for example, only exists as manifestation of old-guard arachnid misandry). Kern's AI having to expend resources to emote is a cool mechanism which translates really well into audiobook format

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