“Children of Ruin” by Adrian Tchaikovsky was a long sequel to Children of Time. The first was enjoyable due to the accelerated social evolution of the spiders. This one has similar features: a genuine concern for social evolution (octopi, and a single cell slime mold that has an atomic level neural net and so can encode and replicate everything). It started off well, but by the middle Tchaikovsky was pulling the old “hey let’s check in where we left the spiders, and advance the plot a couple steps but not much” and then “let’s get back to the spiders who are having the same conversation they had before.” Desperately needed editing.