Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is also very good imo.

Honestly that’s the book I recommend to anyone who thinks Heinlein, Asimov and Niven are all there is to good sci-fi.

YMMV. I found it pretty tedious, especially the 2nd in the series (Children of Ruin). I liked Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture series (Shards of Earth, etc) better.

I think Final Architecture was a better story, but the background and philosophy in the Children series is very very good indeed.

> I found it pretty tedious

100% this. I am not at all arachnophobic -- I like spiders, I find them cute and fascinating. They were the only interesting characters in the book. The humans were all vile and the human scenes dull dull dull.

I really stuggled to finish the book and do not plan to return to the sequels.

Children of Time needs to come with a huge content warning for those with arachnophobia. I got through it, but I didn't enjoy it, for that reason.

i am reading service model right now with our scifi book club. this book needs a trigger warning for programmers. reading it feels like work because i am constantly analyzing what coding faults lead to the choices the robots are making.

See also Ann Leckie’s Ancillary books (5)

Glad to see DCC mentioned, one of my favorite things to do is describe the initial concept to someone and then see them experience the first few chapters and get hooked