Book Review: Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is the sequel to Children of Time and I just had to read it after enjoying that one so much. Here's the Goodreads blurb:

Thousands of years ago, Earth's terraforming program took to the stars. On the world they called Nod, scientists discovered alien life -- but it was their mission to overwrite it with the memory of Earth. Then humanity's great empire fell, and the program's decisions were lost to time. Aeons later, humanity and its new spider allies detected fragmentary radio signals between the stars. They dispatched an exploration vessel, hoping to find cousins from old Earth. But those ancient terraformers woke something on Nod better left undisturbed.

Read on for my mostly spoiler-free review.

Book Review: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

A while back I saw a BlueSky post from Reactor magazine that asked users what modern sci-fi books or series would likely become classics. Children of Time was one of them, and one that I hadn't already read. Coincidentally, I also noticed a friend of mind had recently reviewed it on Goodreads so I decided to give it a shot. Here's the official blurb:

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age—a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

Read on for my spoiler-free review (except for the species on the planet, which some blurbs also reveal).