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Up front, I liked this book. I liked the pacing and the timescale. I liked the spiders. The ending chapters were exciting and fun.

But is it hard enough?

I come to this book with a range of tolerance for "hardness" of sci fi ranging from pure pulp like A Princess of Mars up to fairly grounded books like Red Mars. I am prepared to enjoy books on their own merit, and a lack of science will not prevent me from enjoying a space fairy tale like The Green Book.

In this case, it's a trickier question. Tchaikovsky appropriately tips his hat to David Brin, but a lot of this book reminds me more of Poul Anderson or maybe Vernor Vinge. Because of my experience with those authors, there were a lot of moments where I was looking for something a bit more specific about the science in the book and all I got was "because nanovirus."

I think the most striking part were the passages where the characters were asking the "classicist" to look something up for them and he casually mentioned that they could've just used the index. Really? How is this information stored and processed? The lack of detail took me out of the story a bit.

My other issue was a feeling of anticlimax. Because the book led off with the experiment, that was what I was invested in. Once the spiders contacted the Messenger satellite, my interest drained. It's weird to say this, but the characters on the Gilgamesh didn't sell me on the "future of humanity" as a stake to care about.

I enjoyed this book, but I wouldn't really call it a classic.