If you loved the gritty plausibility of the ark ship Gilgamesh and Lain’s engineer-brain fixes in Children of Time, Reynolds’ hard-SF starships, cryosleep passages, and relativistic travel will hit the same nerve. The way Holsten combs the past to decode Avrana Kern’s legacy echoes how Dan Sylveste and company excavate ancient clues in Revelation Space. It’s the same blend of meticulous tech, deep time, and ominous discoveries—just with a different cosmic puzzle to unearth.

You were fascinated by Portia’s people weaving tools, language, and society over generations while humans circled overhead—Vinge gives you another unforgettable nonhuman culture. The Spiders of Arachna (with scholars, traders, and inventors like Sherkaner Underhill) evolve under the watchful, scheming human Qeng Ho and Emergents. As in the standoff over Kern’s world, you’ll get tense human politics orbiting a civilization that doesn’t think like us—until it very much does.

If the evolutionary arms race on Kern’s world—ants, spiders, parasites, and all—captivated you, Semiosis channels that same eco-logic. As the human colonists on Pax negotiate with an intelligent plant (the city-tree they call Stevland), the stakes feel like when Portia’s heirs learn to read and repurpose their environment. The book leans into cooperation over conquest, much like the human–spider détente you rooted for at the end.

If Portia’s stepwise cognitive leaps and Holsten’s struggle to interpret Kern’s godlike broadcasts left you pondering minds unlike ours, Blindsight is your next rabbit hole. Siri Keeton’s crew meets an alien presence that may be hyper-competent yet truly mindless. It scratches the same itch as watching the spiders invent science and theology on their own terms—and asks whether awareness is an advantage or a liability.

The millennia-spanning braid of the Gilgamesh’s voyage and Portia’s lineage is mirrored here in a panoramic tour of life’s future and past. Like watching Portia, Bianca, and Fabian’s descendants iterate culture and tech across ages, Evolution treats time as a laboratory—zooming out to reveal how tiny adaptations reshape worlds. If that final, hard-won sense of perspective in Children of Time thrilled you, this delivers it in spades.