Only in Children of Time would you ever find a space battle between hyper-intelligent spiders and octopi with an AI stored in a shit ton of ants with a god complex controlling the spider's ship.
Gonna go on a small rant here.
Adrian Tchaikovsky writes other species/alien species so well. Like, so well. He has ideas that are so out there I would never even think of them, let alone know how to incorporate it. He's just so good at writing something so entirely different from anything people are used to, and I love that. It makes everything in the books 100x better, and much more intriguing.
He also does a great job with the science-y side of it. He manages to fit in all of this random information about cell structures and DNA and technology and how the different species think, and it's seamlessly incorporated with the rest of the story. Nothing gets bogged down by a random bunch of information about how different the cells of the animals on this new planet are, because it fits. He's not just putting it there for "oh hey, it's a sci-fi book, gotta have some science-y mumbo jumbo in there," no, it actually adds to the story. It serves to show just how different, how alien everything is.
Go read the books, I'd recommend them for anyone who enjoys sci-fi and can get through fairly wordy books. They're around 500-600 pages each.
