Looking for an SF novel with huge "spiders" on a planet which is frozen most of the time [duplicate]

Question

This SF novel has a very rich and complicated plot, but I remember very little of it. I read it about 20 years ago, probably in a paperback.

What I do remember is that it takes place on a planet with a very elliptical orbit, which means it spends a very long time completely frozen, and only thaws for a short time at periodic returns near perihelia. The native inhabitants, who look like huge spiders, spend long periods in cryogenic sleep and are only active during a short time per cycle (still several years by human reckoning). They are divided into "countries" who fight vicious wars each time they emerge from their cryogenic sleep.

Sometime before the next "thaw" a human expedition arrives. They have an energy source large enough not to need cryogenics even when the planet itself is deep frozen, at least long enough to wait for the "spiders" to wake up in order to interact with them.

I don't remember at all what happens next.

Answer 1

This is Vernor Vinge's 1999 novel A Deepness in the Sky, one of the works in his Zones of Thought universe. This is indeed a novel of rich world-building and plot complexity.

Salient points from the novel matching your memories:

• What I do remember is that it takes place on a planet with a very elliptical orbit, which means it spends a very long time completely frozen, and only thaws for a short time at periodic returns near perihelia. The planet of the spiders is indeed frozen most of the time (a few Terran centuries), and thaws only for a few decades. However, this is due to the dynamics of it's so-called "On-Off" star, which is usually quiescent, but punctuated by regular bursts of stellar fusion.

• The native inhabitants, who look like huge spiders The is very accurate recall of the story.

• [The native inhabitants] spend long periods in cryogenic sleep and are only active during a short time per cycle (still several years by human reckoning). This is also very accurate recall of the story.

• They are divided into "countries" who fight vicious wars each time they emerge from their cryogenic sleep. Not sure I recall "each time", but the spiders' history, civilization at time of human contact, and biology conspire to make the dangers of inter-species violence expected in many forms. There is an opposing 'nation' to that of the central PoV spider character.

• Sometime before the next "thaw" a human expedition arrives. Yes. Members of two human civilizations, the Qeng Ho (a society defined by a parapetetic mercantile lifestyle journeying between planet-bound civilizations over the course of millennia), and the Emergents (a society fueled by a really novel form of intellectual labor exploitation), arrive at nearly the same time, and the interactions between the three forms the nucleus driving the story's plot.

• They have an energy source large enough not to need cryogenics even when the planet itself is deep frozen, at least long enough to wait for the "spiders" to wake up in order to interact with them. Sort of. The technological development permitting spiders to remain active and awake during the freeze occurs during the story, and is facilitated by communication between humans and spiders.

Answer 2

This is Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky - the spiders hibernate because their sun goes out for about two hundred years out of every 250 years, and the early part of the book features a Spider scientist figuring out how to wake during the cold to win the war against his nation's enemy.

Two groups of humans arrive while the Spiders are asleep and wait (and fight each other) until the sun comes back iron and the Spiders wake up.