I don't think I could have imagined an author being able to get me to root for humanity to die out in favor of intelligent spiders, but Tchaikovsky actually did it. By the end,

I would not have been sad if the generation ship had been annihilated

, but I was also happy with how the conflict was resolved; it was the logical conclusion based on everything we had seen about the spiders starting from almost the beginning.

Science-wise, the biology is basically hand-waved; the focus is definitely on the arachnopology/arachnid sociology here. I very much enjoyed both the similarities and the differences between various periods in European history and spider history, seeing the way the spider society responded in overtly similar but subtly different ways to both internal and external pressures.

I guess the humans were fine too. They just spent their half(ish) of the book making me want to throw most of them out an airlock.