Children of Time is a 2015 science fiction novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
In the distant future, humanity seeks to create new habitats for itself on distant planets, terraforming them and seeding them with life. Dr. Avrana Kern is heading one such project, orbiting the tentatively named “Kern’s World”, where the plan is to release monkeys 
infected with a nanovirus that will accelerate their evolution. Through an act of sabotage from an anti-technology group that has also destroyed much of Earth, the monkeys are never released, and the virus instead infects a species of spider, Portia labiata. The book follows the evolution of the spiders and their eventual civilisation, as well as a remnant of humanity that fled to Kern’s World hoping to find paradise.
also children of ruin and children of memory, the sequels, are really good
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I guess my problem is that a lot of social niceties read as disingenuous and deceptive to me, and it’s like, how does one trust anything to be genuine? If someone is smiling at you and then talking behind your back, how do you trust smiles?
Like, my topics of conversation were actively shut down in the last time I had a social circle, so I just assume that that’s what’ll happen if I speak freely. It’s gonna be a fucking problem for someone. On a base level I assume nobody wants to hear about it.
And some of the socially acceptable stuff is stuff I can’t relate to, like friends who are all in the same stage of life, or classmates who are all undergrads while I’m way older.
I don’t have commonality with anyone anymore. So finding these socially acceptable things that are also of interest to me is like, impossible. :::
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I have never really masked, so I don’t question people’s motives most of the time, I just don’t care or expect friendship. Finding someone with common interests is indeed very difficult. My last friends weren’t interested in philosophy enough. Before that I talked about politics a bunch assuming if I knew enough people would understand, and some of them did, but they didn’t want to talk about it all the time. Other autistic people have boring pointless interests most of the time. I s’pose I should get organized eventually, but that takes spoons.
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Okay. To me having no expectations feels like I’m surrendering myself to the worst possible outcome. The lack of a clear positive outcome kinda gives way to infinite negative ones.