Children of Strife

Children of Time #4

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Centuries ago, a maverick terraforming team played God with a distant planet. Out of their vanity and spite, something terrible and unexpected arose.

Generations later, tormented scientist Alis is among the crew of the research vessel that rediscovers this lost outpost. But Alis wakes from nightmares of her own making to an all-too-real catastrophe on board. The rest of the crew has vanished — leaving only Cato, the belligerent mantis-shrimp captain, and Kern, the ship's AI.

Searching for their lost fellows, Alis and Cato must venture into the darkness of the planet below. What did those ancient terraformers unleash? And will their last surviving crewmate become a greater threat than the world itself?

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Audiobook, Space, Aliens, Speculative Fiction

678 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2026

About the author

ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY was born in Lincolnshire and studied zoology and psychology at Reading, before practising law in Leeds. He is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor and is trained in stage-fighting. His literary influences include Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, China Miéville, Mary Gently, Steven Erikson, Naomi Novak, Scott Lynch and Alan Campbell.

Reviews

[Nafisa King · Rating 5 out of 5]

i genuinely didn’t expect to love this more than children of time, but here we are.

adrian tchaikovsky just does not miss for me. his books always pull me out of my day-to-day brain and force me to think bigger, stranger, and honestly… more creatively than i normally allow myself to. and right now, that kind of thinking feels necessary.

children of strife feels like the most emotionally layered entry in the series so far. where time felt novel and expansive, and ruin leaned unsettling, this one carries a quiet sense of tragedy under all the chaos. it’s still wild. still ambitious. still very much “what if evolution went completely off-script.” but there’s something more human sitting underneath it.

and yes… mantis shrimp.

the way tchaikovsky plays with intelligence, perspective, and what it even means to “be” something continues to blow my mind. there’s a kind of fantastic planet energy here. alien, slightly disorienting, but deeply reflective once you sit with it. and there’s also this underlying thread that reminded me of blood diamond in a strange way. not in plot, but in that same uncomfortable awareness of systems, survival, and what people (or species) are forced to become within them.

the timelines weaving together. the slow convergence. the feeling that everything is spiraling toward something inevitable. it’s chaotic, but intentional chaos.

and somehow, through all of that, he still makes these completely unfamiliar beings feel… recognizable.

this series makes me speculate more. question more. imagine more. and i think that’s exactly the kind of storytelling we need right now.

adrian could honestly write anything at this point and i would read it.

thank you Orbit for the ARC!

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought the Children of Time series was a trilogy so I was slightly apprehensive when I found out about volume 4. However, I trust Tchaikovsky so I had to read this and boy, was it a wild ride!

Summarizing what this is about is not all THAT easy though. At least not without giving away too much. But I'll try.
After a recap of what the previous 3 books were about, it all ties into ANOTHER terraforming group we hadn't know about back in the day when Kern was human and alive. These terraformers are ... eccentric though. Not just the rich dude who had the ship built and hired the others. They are ALL ... not very nice people. And they tinker with a planet. What could possibly go wrong?! *throws arms up*
There are some other humans and there is a crew made up of spiders, a mantis-shrimp, the Kern AI, and Alis.

So yeah, it's all about this one planet and what those terraformers cooked up.



The different timelines were delicious, let me tell you. The action was almost relentless.

As usual with this author, it's about more than what is on the surface (excuse the pun). However, all of it comes together beautifully, creating the perfect blend. There is science, there is fiction, there is humanity, there is morals, there is Schadenfreude, there is exploration, there is humour, there is heartbreak ... and there is so much more.

So yeah, great book. Maybe even the best in the series since the first (there is a special magic in beginnings).

[Nataliya · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you know you’re reading an Adrian Tchaikovsky book? Count the appendages, surely.

“Life on Hart had its own ideas, and most of those ideas had too many legs.”

We are back in Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time world where in far future human technology led to demise of Earth and emergence of other societies via terraforming going unsupervised with an aid of a plot-convenient “uplifting” nanovirus (“which grants a kind of inescapable empathy for the other to all concerned”) bringing us sentient giant spiders, octopuses, birds, an occasional human-based AI and nanovirus-uplifted humans who finally learned to look for friendly “Us” inside the others rather than enemy “Them”.

As for which multi-appendages creature gets to star here — enter mantis shrimp, a creature of insane visual acuity and yet-unprobed depths of innate aggression that gets, for the lack of a better word, quite, ahem, punchy.

“He doesn’t like anybody. In fact, the concept of liking—a positive attitude towards someone allowing you to be passively at ease in their presence—isn’t really a part of Stomatopod psychology.”


(Mantis shrimp that can deliver a bullet-like punch. Don’t get in their way.)

—————

“But, just as sufficiently advanced technology might be indistinguishable from magic, so sufficiently advanced terraforming could be indistinguishable from nature.”

And nature - Life - as we know, finds a way.

The problem starts when human folly tries to interfere.

Because unlike the planets where nanovirus and nature were left alone to do their work, this planet’s terraforming and evolution was directed by a few humans with megalomania, plutocracy, mad science, bureaucracy and general grifter nature all in antagonistic symbiosis. All in the pursuit of a new Earth meant to be paradise for the few, not too far from what Avrana Kern was doing before things got a bit spiderized: “Earth, basically. Earth Two, meaning Earth but owned and controlled entirely by their little pantheon, to be colonized only by properly subservient émigrés.”

“How can a whole world be malevolent?”

Well, if it takes after its terraforming dysfunctional “parents”, it can be indeed.

————

“You discover, in the fullness of time, you weren’t that funny or that clever, but you still have to live with all the punchlines.”

I have loved Adrian Tchaikovsky from the very first page, and that love remains true. He knows what he is doing and how to do it well, and he clearly has a blast with it. Three separate timeliness from three different Ages of Exploration on the same far-away planet (terraformers, human refugees in space arcs, and post-Earth multi-species spacefaring society); easy character development both human and nonhuman (and although at first I was a bit concerned about the almost cartoonish level of megalomaniac villainy, I then thought of current events on our planet and realized that things are really not that far-fetched here); logical progression of events with no cheating reliance on twists; confident and clear writing without need for gimmicks.

There’s deep humanism (although given the natures of his characters, perhaps a better word than ‘humanism’ is needed), and ability to combine utter seriousness and dark comedy on the same page, and fascinating ideas and themes — identity, responsibility, legacy, restraint, sacrifice, and that’s just a start.

And — mantis shrimp!!!
———

Now, unpopular opinion — I still love its predecessor, Children of Memory, so unlike my fellow reviewers who view this book as Tchaikovsky’s return to form after that one, I maintain that he didn’t need to return to form as he always was there.

4.5 stars, rounded up.

——————

Thanks to NetGalley and Orbit Books for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

—————
My review for the first book in the series, Children of Time, is here.
My review for the second, Children of Ruin, is here.
My review for the third, Children of Memory, is here.

[Alex Sarll]

Like many, the first Adrian Tchaikovsky I read was his uplift epic Children Of Time. Impressive as it was, I liked the sequel Children Of Ruin even more, not least because octopuses are better than spiders, but third book Children Of Memory felt like a mis-step, its decaying loops and dying world far too reminiscent of lockdown. As such, I was gratified when this fourth installment began by pretty much dismissing Memory's macguffin as a colossal dead-end, a rabbit-hole good for little more than making people lose all touch with reality (though I was a little sad that that book's redeeming feature, the sapient corvids, merit even less mention).

As it turns out, though, rabbit-holes are a big theme here; appropriately, the closest thing to a protagonist is called Alis, and there are a few supplementary nods to the correspondence. It's always been a series in which identity has been mutable; after all, the longest-standing character was already, before the first book was done, a human scientist who got uploaded into a computer before being copied from that operating system into one running on ants. But the sheer variety of ways in which the self of one or another character gets tweaked, branched, merged, shifted or dissolved this time out is dizzying.

The obvious way to play that would be as identity horror, and early on that seems to be what's happening. But as the story progresses, it twists. Because the two new elements added to the mix this time are the ones justifying that Strife. First off, a rival terraforming mission to the aforementioned Kern's, run by a consortium of self-proclaimed brilliant, genius, innovator, disruptor billionaires (or probably trillionaires at this point, actually; that part of Tchaikovsky's timeline is too close to our present for comfort, but certainly not close enough for the ultra-rich to still be bravely getting by on a mere twelve figures). Now, I'm getting a bit tired of this as a fictional motif, not least because the likes of Mountainhead always end up making the fictional analogues far more rounded and likeable than their factual originals. Tchaikovsky, though, manages to catch the utter emptiness of the bastards, yet with enough variation between the five of them that these sections remain blackly comic, rather than becoming a slog like Memory. And the notion of a planet built on their half-grasped Darwinism, personality flaws and overconfidence in their own abilities...well, I won't say it turns out about how you'd expect, because it is eventually sort of habitable, and I wouldn't trust Musk to keep a fishtank going. But it's pretty bad.

In the other corner, though: we've had passing mention before of the stomatopod culture which evolved in the seas of the spiders' world. Now, we get to meet one. And he is a delight. I think this may be the closest the series has come to playing evolution for laughs, but come on, mantis shrimp are pretty funny, a brightly coloured little critter with a lethal punch that's been known to die because of punching a hole in their own tank. Now picture a giant one that has guns too, and communicates in gnomic poetry, mainly expressing its exasperation that the current situation can apparently not be resolved by punching something. It's every SF 'warrior culture' thought through to the point of absurdity. And as we open, one of those, Cato, has to work with Alis to find out what exactly has happened to the rest of their spaceship's crew on what we but not they know to be the planet the rich dickheads built.

Obviously the plot from there involves a lot of daring rescues, dangerous biology, shit blowing up, and even punching (though never as much as Cato would prefer). But under that it's a story about restraining one's own worst appetites, about how treating identity as a fortress can easily mean letting it be a prison, diminishing the so-jealously-guarded self even before one considers the effect on others. One could certainly talk about it in terms of ego and id, except I think Freud would have been horrified by the shifting sands of personhood which Tchaikovsky instead sees as full of potential. And ultimately it all comes down to a rousing reminder that doing the right thing is the right thing to do. Which could easily be dismissed as the sappiest and most obvious of all the sappy, obvious morals, if the novel hadn't been so perfectly engineered that it reads as emerging organically, rather than clumsily superimposed, in a mirror image of the way the tycoons' ghastliness naturally emerges from the world they made. And given the way we're all trapped down the rabbit-hole their models and precursors have wrought, that moral feels far more vital and surprising than it ought.

(Netgalley ARC)

[VitalT · Rating 3 out of 5]

Children of Strife — Adrian Tchaikovsky
★★★☆☆ (3)

Adrian Tchaikovsky remains very good at the thing that keeps me coming back to him: he can make strange minds and strange situations feel lively, funny, and worth following. There are some genuinely wild images and ideas in this one, from creator-gods shaping a world to biomass itself serving as a substrate for consciousness. That kind of ridiculous-but-compelling speculative scale is a real strength of his, and when he is in that mode, the book is a lot of fun.

He is also still very good at writing characters with funny or skewed mindsets. Even when the plot is sprawling, he can usually give you a perspective or a way of thinking that keeps the pages moving. And as usual, some of the themes feel timely, brushing up against current questions in politics, technology, and control without becoming too on-the-nose.

What keeps this from being more than a solid three-star read for me is something I increasingly feel with Tchaikovsky: he is so prodigious that his books often seem like they needed another hard editing pass. The ideas are there. The themes are there. The big set pieces are there. But the plotlines can get lost in the weeds, and the novel starts to feel more diffuse than it should. I enjoyed it, and I can absolutely see the appeal, but I also came away thinking that if he slimmed these books down and tightened them more aggressively, they would land much harder.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An epic continuation of Tchaikovsky's saga about humanity's efforts to terraform the stars, Children of Strife is by turns fascinating and deeply unsettling. The novel weaves together three separate timelines to tell the story of a planet where terraforming has gone disastrously awry, giving rise to a thriving, hyper-adaptable form of interconnected life that is both wholly unnatural and subtly malevolent. Born from a flawed process overseen by a group of deeply flawed people led by a sociopathic megalomaniac, the planet becomes yet another sharp expression of Tchaikovsky's enduring theme: mankind's hubris, and the chaos it leaves behind. Along the way he also has some profundities to share that touch on identity, consciousness and godhood.

[Gyalten Lekden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. Tchaikovsky builds upon the beautifully rich and complicated world he has built in the previous Children of… books, and added yet another new, novel dimension, rocketing to the top to share space as a favorite in the series. This story is told in three timelines, one for each of the three ages of ancient Earth and its star-flung peoples, and the three timelines converge beautifully and raucously. The writing is inquisitive and insightful, urging the characters and readers along, both. It is witty, and the tone and tenor of the humor changes depending on which character’s perspective it is following, so there is never anything that feels repetitive or forced. In fact, the world and characters are so robust and exciting that the witticisms and one-liners scattered throughout feel like perfect offshoots of the characters themselves, and there is never sense of an omniscient author peeking behind from behind the curtain. The pacing, too, is spot on, moving each storyline forward at a quick and exciting rate, always expanding horizons and understanding, going deeper and wider at the same time but never outpacing the readers. The shifts from one timeline to another are perfect, and the mini cliffhangers at each such precipice are just enough to pique curiosity but not feel like mere narrative conveniences.

What is most impressive, though, is that amidst this variegated, complicated, wildly inventive world and three interlocking, satisfying stories Tchaikovsky is investigating a lot of exciting and important ideas. There is a fundamentally humanist and communitarian bent to the philosophical explorations, but they are wide-ranging and never didactic, instead delivered by flawed and complicated interlocutors who are stumbling around themselves. There are really interesting questions about identity, about knowing and understanding yourself and then the idea of how you perform that sense of self for the world. There are ideas about what it means to struggle and sacrifice, for and against the world, and ask what it is possible to achieve if your understanding of life is one of mere survival only. There is the exploration of ego and genius, recognizing that these are not the traits of saviors, necessarily, but forces capable of uplift or destruction in equal measures. Sacrifice, society, responsibility, community, restraint, and above all personal identity in a world so infinite that the human mind relies on metaphor to understand it. This novel has heart and intelligence, both. It is inviting and encompassing, and draws out a high sci-fi concept to really delightful destination, with strong writing, stronger story-telling, and exquisite world- and character-building to push the boundaries of the mind into a place of both reflective contemplation and unbridled delight.

[eden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tchaikovsky is beginning to remind me of Stephen King: obviously talented and amazingly imaginative but reaching a level of success and output which defies refinement and reining in by editors. Alien Clay, his standalone novel from 2024, was really quite bad, so it’s a relief that Children of Strife isn’t similarly terrible — but I do think it has some weaknesses.

The first third is deliberately opaque and, let’s face it, rather dull. That means you have to slog through 150-200 pages before things really come to Life and there’s even the slightest sense of a character you actually want to read about. It took me almost a month just to get through the first third of this, whereas I read each of the first three installments of the series in less than a week.

I found the narrative voice a little inconsistent. It’s not just omniscient third person; the Narrator is a presence in himself, who calls characters “our Alis” and makes literary and cultural references that the characters obviously don’t and can’t know, considering their milieu. It’s distracting enough that I’m always aware I’m reading a tale told by a nerd full of sly winks and Science ™. It makes everything feel a little false.

The intentionally disorienting way the book presents the main protagonists means you don’t really get to know or care for them until it’s basically too late, book’s over. Whereas you are forced to spend quite a lot of time with the reprehensible cadre of antagonists and get to know them more than you would ever desire.

Finally, in regard to the plot, it’s all build-up and no real climax. What is meant to be the big threat at the end of the book holds no narrative tension whatsoever because the truth of the characters has been purposefully withheld for so long, for no other reason than to drag out the “mystery”.

In that sense, I suppose it’s fitting, as even though Children of Strife does eventually grow quite interesting and even enjoyable (hence three stars), I was never invested. Much like a minor deity with nothing better to do might idly observe the tussles of a pile of creepy crawlies.

*Advance Review Copy provided by NetGalley*

[Denise Ruttan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series is just so incredibly satisfying. I hate how publishers have decided that sci fi doesn't sell these days because this is just the kind of sci fi that I want to see more of, true science fiction that is thoughtful, sweeping, and innovative, both character-driven and plausibly science based. The kind of sci fi that I would devour if only we had more of it. I usually hate series but I love this series so much that I would read 10 more books in this amazing universe if they were to exist. I really do hope they will exist. These books should also be a movie or TV series, as they had a cinematic scope and feel to them.

You don't technically have to read each of the books in order because they take place in different generations, planets, species, and characters, but I'm glad I did because I think I would have been a lot more confused about the worldbuilding if I hadn't, and there are some recurring background characters that go through remarkable transformations over the course of the four books that you have to read in order to fully appreciate.

In this universe terraformers take to the stars and some are set on bio-engineering other species. After Earth dies of poison and conflict, the mad genius terraformers mean to infect monkeys with a virus that can speed up their evolution, but things go wrong and the virus infects invertebrates instead. On this world Avrana Kern is its arrogant lord and master. I really loathed her conceited attitude at first and thought her change into a AI sentience that cared about others was remarkable, especially contrasted with the even more despicable billionaires of this book.

This book takes place on the planet Marduk, run by terraformers in the vein of Elon Musk who are evil, spoiled billionaires who fancy themselves geniuses. This planet went wrong, as they use it for their playground of monsters. But when an ark ship of humans finds it, all hell breaks loose. And when the spacefaring spiders, shrimp, octupus, enhanced Humans who can relate with the spiders, and an intelligent parasitic slime mold from the last book find this monstrous planet, the hell might become something truly livable.

The other remarkable transformation was in the form of Mira, the slime mold, who starts off as a Borg-like creature intent on devouring worlds, and then Kern persuades it that its curiosity would be better served by consent and accommodation. Mira then strives to become singular and more sentient, and she might be the only one who can save this evil world infested with the godlike intelligences of four evil, bored geniuses. There are some fascinating philosophical questions of sentience and self examined here, but it didn't get too bogged down in philosophy; the pace could often be relentless, even over such long books.

The characters in this were flawed, often unlikable and unrelatable, but I found them complex and fascinating and I found it compelling how I could go from loathing them one minute to rooting for them to succeed.

The science in this was also flawless, which I found utterly absorbing. While the premise was a bit silly- a virus can't change the evolutionary biology of invertebrates in quite those ways - I found if I suspended disbelief over that bit, the civilizations that all these creatures developed were incredibly plausible. It was fascinating to watch each species evolve in their own unique ways, and overcome communication and cultural barriers to interact with each other. This is the kind of sci-fi book that truly teaches empathy.

In short this series is an impressive achievement. With such an immense cast of characters and intricate worldbuilding, I'm finding it hard to do it proper justice in a short review. I feel like I have a book hangover after finishing this series. No other series will compare quite so easily. You just have to read these to understand!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[David A Townsend]

People were something you ran out of once you dropped the bombs.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky, the fourth book in the Children of Time series, brings together elements from the previous three books, and introduces a mantis shrimp to Tchaikovsky’s group of uplifted and intelligent creatures. In his newest entry, we are gifted another look at Tchaikovsky's brilliance with a host of fascinating concepts and wild science fiction ideas. However, the choice of splitting the novel into three separate narratives, and relying on an assemblage of unlikable characters leaves us with a bit of a slog and no sympathetic protagonist to latch onto.

The story is told in three distinct ages, the First Age, the Second Age, and the Third Age. The First Age tells the story of a rival group to Avrana Kern when humanity first set out to terraform planets. This is a group of second place failures, losing their ideal pick of a planet to Kern, and led by the egotistical Gerry Hartmand. On their targeted planet they unleash round after round of evolutionary failures, growing life into an endless nightmare of bugs, wiping the planet clean, and starting over again. They are stuck in this rut, until Redina Kott and Pil find a way out of the mess and turn themselves into a godlike pantheon over Life on this planet. The ideas in the First Age are truly fascinating, though at times, a bit of a stretch to accept the small time scale in which planetary terraforming and the evolution of life is taking place. The unfortunate part of this story is that every character in this Age is incredibly unlikable, and, at times, can feel like a slog to read through their insufferable attitudes.

The Second Age is the most enjoyable story of the three ages, sadly, it is also the shortest. It tells the story of an arkship leaving Earth after Earth’s collapse due to war and strife. This narrative has the most likable characters, and the interesting plot of arriving at Hartmand’s planet from the First Age, and playing victim to the horrors unleashed upon that world. We see some really interesting concepts at play, and a touch of scifi horror. If only the story lasted longer and we were able to have more time with these characters.

The Third Age picks up from where Children of Memory left off as we follow a ship of misfits with Kern, humans, portids, the Nodan entity, and the newest entry into the series, Cato the mantis shrimp. The nanovirus from the first book that uplifted the portid spiders also made its way into the ocean to uplift a species of mantis shrimp. Cato’s character is really interesting and Tchaikovsky puts a great amount of thought into the psychology and culture of an intelligent mantis shrimp; a great addition to the growing cast of uplifted beings in this series. The beginning of this narrative spends some time with Alis, wrapping up events from the previous book, and it was a rough beginning indeed. We get the whole “are they in a simulation/not in a simulation” routine far too long at the start of this that it quickly becomes tedious.

The three ages wrap up together as the story goes along, as one age affects another and so on. Unfortunately, the stories are told out of place and this often has the effect of destroying any narrative tension built up from one section to the next.

Overall, Children of Strife is full of interesting science fiction ideas, and introduces us to the uplifted mantis shrimp. The story brings together events from the previous novels, and interweaves three separate narrative “ages” into a cohesive story, though with the downside of having to slog through some unlikable characters and a lack of tension within the plot. If you liked the Children of Time series so far, you’ll probably enjoy this book as well. It certainly has enough of Tchaikovsky's incredible imagination on display to be worth the read.

[Faith · Rating 3 out of 5]

“In there with her: a robot spider, possessed by a millennia-dead human woman who thinks she’s her own cousin; some kind of PTSD combat shrimp. Yes. Reality. How reassuring.”

“Children of Time” is wonderful. The next 2 books in the series are good. I think this fourth book is unnecessary and just OK. I hope it’s the end of the series. The author has a wonderful imagination, and I have enjoyed many of his books. However, there are too many characters in this book, set in three different places. Some of them are multiple characters in the same body. Also, sometimes “reality” is real, sometimes it’s a simulation. I had trouble keeping track of the characters and the “reality” since I didn’t care enough to bother to take notes. Most of the characters are unlikable (particularly in one of the settings where all of the characters are backbiting, unpleasant and suffer from megalomania). I did like the mantis shrimp though. Do not read this if you haven’t read the earlier books.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Viv (vivianneslibrary) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is hard to rate because I can’t deny that Adrian is a talented writer but I just couldn’t get into it compared to the other installments. I found myself zoning out while reading and having a harder timing grasping what was happening in this story. I’ve always loved the themes that he writes about and I wish I loved this as much as the other ones. :(
3.25⭐️

[Benghis Kahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was a mess that had incredible potential to live up to Children of Time for me if Tchaikovsky had taken a different approach. I don't usually think I could've improved a book if I were involved in the editing process, but I have strong opinions on why this one underwhelmed me to the point where I almost DNF'ed in the middle.

I'm thankful I didn't since the last act with the convergence of plot lines was great stuff and quite engaging, but it only made me feel even more disappointed at the missed potential of this sequel overall. And even in the less engaging sections there were moments of utter brilliance and caustic wit to appreciate, but I really have a preference for books these days where every element and storyline fully click and create an immersive whole.

Tchaikovsky is in an angry, cheeky mood these days with the state of the world, and it's leading to a more satirical approach in his recent releases (Alien Clay, Service Model, And Put Away Childish Things come to mind). Here he is skewering the Elon Musk-type of idiot magnate, and it resulted in a primary plot line of the book being devoid of genuine stakes for me filled as it was with a coterie of two-dimensional blowhard caricatures.

These characters made up the First Age timeline of the book of a group of old Earth terraformers, which feels like it gets top billing for most of the novel and is intercut with chunks from a lackluster Second Age plot line and the present-day Third Age one where we pick up from after the events of Children of Memory.

The First Age sequences were a real killer for me -- ultra repetitive, flat, and involving interactions with the planet that veered so far from grounded science that we might as well be in a fantasy series by now. I love fantasy, but since this is purportedly hard sci-fi, it's getting tough for me to swallow. One of the exhilarating aspects of Children of Time was feeling like what was playing out was believable given the starting circumstances and a few initial conceits that we were able to wrap our minds around -- things like an uplift virus that bestows intelligence or a concrete physical way of passing down memories. CoT had me experiencing a far future that felt plausible and exciting, and then Children of Ruin expanded the worldbuilding in intriguing ways that brought a new sense of danger and exploration. But I struggle to see the reasons for Children of Memory and Strife to exist.

By now we're really spinning our wheels on the ideas and theme front, retreading much of the same ground as the previous novels (except adding in the present day social commentary I found tiresome). This novel could have been vastly streamlined, and if I had been the developmental editor, I would've recommended limiting the First Age and Second Age sequences to much shorter single chunks that would appear together somewhere in the middle instead of being intercut with the present day from the start.

The rotating structure Tchaikovsky landed on meant we got absolutely no momentum with the present day storyline, and the Second Age one which I liked a decent amount with the fewest pages got completely lost in the fray. Something is also off with the character work here which is hard for me to put a finger on -- it's not like this series was ever about memorable individual characters, but it still feels like he made more of an effort with them in Children of Time/Ruin.

This is veering into sci-fi that's almost purely ideas and theme-focused, which I'd be on board for if we actually got more of the brilliant bits. I think the character-focused readers would've bailed by now anyway so maybe it's a non-issue, since the people continuing after Children of Memory on the whole might be the perfect audience for this. Certainly I'm seeing lots of early love for it among the series' most passionate fans, and I only wish I could be among them.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one didn’t quite capture the magic of any of the previous installments.

Yes it’s very creative, yes there’s a new uplifted species (mantis shrimp) and a new super-consciousness. Both could be interesting, but something was missing from the texture of the story to really keep me engaged.

Maybe it’s that no one really seemed like a real person (not even Cato, the mantis shrimp!) or that much of the narration came across like a history lesson, which felt removed from the events and kept me from being invested in the (otherwise very important-sounding) stakes.

[Isabelle reads a book a day because she has no friends]

I JUST FOUND OUT THIS EXISTED LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! March cannot come soon enough

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

2026/4/13 read.

What more virtuous ambition is there, than to take that sky-spanning enigma, fold it small, and make it something that will fit into a human mind?

This is how Alis appreciates her work as a researcher. This can also be how I appreciate Tchaikovsky's every work basically.

2025/5/13:
there's a date now!

[Noémie J. Crowley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never doubted this book would be a masterpiece. The Children of series has been my favourite for years at this point, and I have yet to read one of Adrian's work that I do not like or think to be less good in some way. I have never doubted, yet I am still absolutely blown away by this book. This is one of the very best story I have ever read. And a fourth book in a series ? Jeff did it too with Absolution last year, but dammit, Adrian, how did you do it I wonder ?
This book is everything I hoped it would be, and more. A callback to the three others, of course, themes and ideas we have explored already but pushed to a new limit. But also a completely new lens to those notions and concepts, that I did not foresee. I loved everything about this book. The godlike figures that go completely berserk, humanity on its knees but never backing down, the plants that devour and change everything (genuinely horrorish, very VanderMeer, 100/10), the giant prideful prawn who punches their problems away, Kern, my beloved psycho AI. How could I not ?
In some ways, this book is almost as grandiose as Children of Time was. It made me feel the same ways, in many aspects. I cried, I questioned, I gasped out loud, I felt uncomfortable, I felt inspired. More than anything, I am once again awed that we are able to read such a powerful story. I don't think Adrian is celebrated enough, so let me be the one to do so : my dude, you are without a doubt the greatest modern science fiction writer, and I am so beyond excited for all your projects to come. This, this right here, is the culmination of science fiction and space opera.
Good fucking hell that was awesome, and I have goosebumps still, and I hope I always will when thinking back about this.
I don't always feel I am lucky to live at this point in time, but just knowing I get to experience Adrian's new works when they are released is enough, at times.
So thanks, and please never stop writing.

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a satisfying read! I do wish I had tackled rereading a couple of the books preceding as I had lost a lot of the details in my memory, especially about Mira but I still enjoyed myself immensely. It was layered, complex and completely engrossing. Cato stole every scene he was in and I came to feel quite a lot of affection for many of the characters as I often do with series with chunky page amounts. This was one of my most anticipated books of the year and it did not disappoint.

[Mara · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5⭐️ a book that really lived up to its name. There was a whole lot of strife in here that’s for sure. For the most part it’s unsettling, some of the concepts Tchaikovsky covers really is so relevant to today. Especially with the idea of human bioengineering & AI. I didn’t click with the characters the same way I did the last three books, and felt like this one meandered. It was a bit choppy for me and I pushed through. The last 30% was a good time for me!

[Saif Shaikh | Distorted Visions · Rating 5 out of 5]

Advanced Review Copy provided in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Orbit Books and Netgalley.

Score: 🕷🦑🌱🌍🦐

Since this is an ARC, the review aims to be as Spoiler-free as possible.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series is what made him a household name among many Science Fiction and Fantasy readers. We thought the adventure was over at the end of the third entry, Children of Memory. However, the children are back, and they are as testy as ever. This time they want to play God.

Let’s go on an adventure!

As with many others, my first foray into what would become my ardent support of Adrian Tchaikovsky, started with the first entry in this series, the self-titled, Children of Time. Even for someone that feels comfortable navigating esoteric concepts and far-flung future fungibles, this book tested every neuron of my imagination and flexed every muscle of my internal imagery creation engine. I was deeply impressed by the scale, and sheer chutzpah of Tchaikovsky’s maniacal creativity in the two sequels, Children of Ruin, and Children of Memory. So it is no surprise, that I snagged an opportunity to review the latest entry, which came as a surprise to me, the fourth in the series, Children of Strife.

The Children of Time series has dealt with the practical and philosophical quagmires of the survival of humankind after the inevitable collapse of our Earth, where the best and brightest have carried forth the hopes of humanity to far-off planets and systems, to terraform them to continue the species. But the Universe worships Chaos! Things don’t go according to plan, and extra-planetary, extra-species shenanigans ensue.

In every entry in this series, Tchaikovsky has highlighted a key species through which to weave his grand tale. In Time it was genetically-modified, uplifted, intelligent spiders, in Ruin it was octopuses and an all-consuming multicellular matrix, and in Memory it was uplifted corvids/ravens. Part of the reason many have held on to this series, because we (definitely I) are curious about which species, the mad entomologist would feature next.

In Children of Strife, we get mantis shrimp! Yup! Together with plants/botanical species, and well, Nature itself! Talk about raising the stakes!

“They shall come to know us. They shall fear us. We are the dark within the trees. We are the wind’s whisper. We are the plagues in their bellies. We are the padding step behind them on the road. We are the gods of this world, and they shall worship us!”

Children of Strife runs in parallel to Time in that it regales the story of another group of renegade geniuses as they escape a dying Earth to travel to the far reaches of space, and terraform a planet, making it habitable for successive generations. These events happen in parallel to Avrana Kern’s spider-uplift sequences narrated in Children of Time. In classic Tchaikovsky fashion, Strife is also told across different timelines, which only converge towards the end of the book, with seemingly disparate stories and characters crashing together… literally and violently!

Narrated through the perspectives of the “trickster” in the terraforming scientists group, Redina Kott, the innocent-but-broken Alis, and the warrior mantis shrimp, Cato, Children of Strife plays with facets of creation and the power of godlike power. Faced with eternity, is the core of creation destined for anything except the titular strife, even if it means mutually assured destruction and the promise of oblivion?

To dive into any further detail would wade into spoiler territory. Needless to say, Tchaikovsky is at his wryest, his dryest, his wittiest, and his most profound in Children of Strife. His ability to conjure up alien worlds and fill it with creatures unheard of in the science-fiction space, and to give them personalities, motivations, and interactions, that feel simultaneously eerie and off-putting in their strangeness, yet altogether familiar in their underlying humanity is a feat to behold!

Like many others, I struggled with the sheer imaginative load that Children of Time imposed on its readers, as the author stretched the “what if” of SciFi to its breaking limit. A challenging read to be sure. The ante was only heightened with Ruin and Memory, the latter of which felt a tad disconnected from the series. While the first three entries could be read as standalones, Children of Strife does require previous knowledge of the series, especially, Time and Ruin. Perhaps, I was more prepared, or I have become more comfortable with Tchaikovsky’s dense writing style, but I managed to get through Children of Strife easier than previous entries. This is also a testament to the author’s growth over the series, because the concepts are just as dense and frankly wacky as the others.

“You discover, in the fullness of time, you weren’t that funny or that clever, but you still have to live with all the punchlines”

Children of Time felt altogether novel, Children of Ruin was just downright creepy, and Children of Memory felt oddly nostalgic. In this regard, Children of Strife combined these feelings, wrapped up with a sigh of tragedy. In a world of aliens, millennia in the future, at the very edge of our imagination, a very human, a very familiar feeling.

Have I said that after reading the Children of Time series, his grimdark fantasy Tyrant Philosophers series, and a smattering of other standalones, Adrian Tchaikovsky has shot up to my favorite authors of all time? At this point, I will read nearly anything with his name on it, and Children of Strife only further cements my fervor. A strong contender for a favorite-of-the-year entry.

I cannot wait to see where the adventure takes me next!

Read this review and more on my Medium page: Distorted Visions

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[Mclain ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, I love Adrian’s writing and always have but this didn’t hit as well as the first few books did. I loved the incorporation of the uplifted mantis shrimp, there’s nothing like warlike crustaceans and the research that went into these characters. I also really loved revisiting “Mira” as I found it to be one of the most amazing additions to the children of time series in the first place. It really brought forth a slice of horror when we initially met the parasitic entity. I felt like this book had a bit more humor than its predecessors. As always you’re met with the ethical dilemmas that come with interfering with evolution and what happens when humans become godlike. The science was great.

“Intelligence is not necessarily a great evolutionary boon. Large brains, complex neurologies and existential angst are expensive developmentally and energetically.”

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love the recap as prologue! And I love that one of the main characters is a mantis shrimp. Mantis shrimp are very cool. Have you ever watched videos when they wack some other critter? If you haven‘t, you definitely should before reading this book!

Tchaikovsky is not great at linear story telling. This is the complex and time-jumping version of the author, so I went slowly to not miss any important details.

The beginning has a lot of telling and setting up of the scenery. Not my thing, but I don‘t mind so much with Tchaikovsky.

Wild plot with a lot of jumping from one timeline to another, back and forth. Lots of characters, human and Human and spider, shrimp and Kern! Fun, but also complicated. What a guessing game of what will happen next. Not for casual reading. Brilliant.

Tchaikovsky plays around with uploaded consciousness. And entitled billionaires. Power and what to do with it, society and how to get along despite all of your cultural differences, team work, consent and self awareness, making good choices and consequences.

I loved this book. However—and this is complaining on an extremely high level!—I ran out if steam during the last 20% of the book and lost interest just a tiny little bit. Tchaikovsky’s choice to give us a deep dive into stomapod society and history this late into the book was odd. Info dumps don’t usually happen just before the finale of such an action driven narrative. Docking a quarter point for that!

Mel Hudson does a splendid job as a narrator. Excellent!

🕷️🦐🚀🌏¾ of 5

DRAMATIS PERSONAE or Lifeline to Not Loosing the Plot:

The First Age
Pancreator – terraforming ship/station
Gerey Hartmand – Chief Visionary and Creator
Sui Dorcheson – Second Visionary, Geosciences
Ken Pil – Assistant Visionary, Interrelated Biosystems
Ottis Milner – Assistant Visionary, Cybernetics and Logistics
Redina Kott – Assistant Visionary, troublemaker
Domus – AI underseer system

The Second Age
Nergal, Pangu, Marduk – ark ships
Lamya Cosimir – Engineering Chief of the Nergal
Goscari – Science Chief of the Nergal
Peligrent – Engineering Second of the Nergal
Maclen Deu – Captain of the Nergal
Hannoy – Project Management
Olumo – Captain of the Pangu
Denizon Kieraven – Security Chief of the Marduk
Anbar Ilshir – Engineering Chief of the Marduk
Hieron – Science Chief of the Marduk
Bartilow – Classicist of the Marduk
Chessu – Science team, Marduk
Dol – Science team, Marduk
Fennic – Security team, Marduk
Onner – shuttle monitor, Marduk

The Third Age
Enkidu, Gilgamesh – Second Age ark ships
Imir – a world containing a vast alien simulation machine

Dissenter – a maverick research vessel
Alis – researcher
Kern – former human, now AI
Cato – Stomatopod veteran
Mira – therapist
Portia – researcher
Fabian – researcher
Helena – research leader
Galean – researcher
Leus, Bianca, Polonius – members of Alis’s research team on Imir

Four Dragon Ford – a frontier community
Neco Kasmar – Hunter, Four Dragon Ford
Ellan – Chief Hunter, Four Dragon Ford
Udin – Chief Engineer, Four Dragon Ford
Mezclo – Archivist, Four Dragon Ford

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a slower read for me than the other books in the series, but worth the read. I loved the way the author weaved some of the current issues in our world today into the story. As always with Tchaikovsky, I loved the ending.

[Nicholas · Rating 1 out of 5]

By far the most disappointing book I’ve ever read. I still have no idea what happened for most of the book. I also never cared about a single character in this one, which is a long change from a book that made me love a spider when it started.

[Joe Wolff · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC received from NetGalley.

The 4th entry in the Children Of trilogy! And I got to read it before all of ya's!

It was a pretty solid book. Better focus than book 3 as it is back with a better focus on the scifi type ecosystem that books 1 and 2 excelled with.

Divided across 3 galactic ages, there are a diverse range of interesting happenstances. You get to see the description of neat technological concepts and the human/non-human reaction to those.

The Structure
The book is divided into alternating parts over each of 3 galactic ages. In execution, I would say this was not done too well. Though each part on its own is quite engaging, there are multiple times where all tension is removed, since we know exactly what is going on, either from a previous or future age. This could have been remediated if the alternating was skewed in favor of revealing more about age 2, then 1, then 3. But overall, not a huge complaint. The story is the same regardless, but I felt that maybe about 10% of the book suffered as a result.

Age 1
Age 1 is tied for my favorite galactic age. Here, we get some jerks trying to terraform a planet. It introduces a new interesting terraforming concept, different than those in prior books in the series.

This age excels at that terraforming concept, which is tough to visualize but is fairly engaging to see in practice. A main focal point of the chapter is the jerkiness of the characters, which was somewhat fun to see. Though Tchaikovsky's character writing leaves something intangible for me to desire. We get a lot of internal dialogue, but something seems lacking. Perhaps the internal dialogue is more descriptive than emotive, so we never can get a great sense of what the main character of this age is actually like. As this is the case with characters of other ages as well, I will not mention it again in my next 2 sections.

Age 2
Age 2 is tied for my favorite galactic age. This age, we are introduced to last, though I think it would have been beneficial to introduce most of this first to give us something to wonder about ages 1 and 3.

This is probably also the shortest age, but short and sweet. Pretty optimistic, as we get a pretty decent portrayal of a beaten up earth, the desperation, yet great resourcefulness demonstrated in a blind quest to seek a new home.

Age 3
Age 3 is tied for my favorite galactic age. Here, things culminate, and they culminate somewhat satisfactorily. Unique to this age, is a Kern unit including a punchy shrimp that is interacting with the setup of this book.

The punchy shrimp is great. Probably the best part of the book. He is crude, will punch anything that gets in front of his "zone", and speaks in blunt poetry (or at least that is how it is translated).

In conclusion
This was a solid entry in the Children Of series. It does what prior works has done well, though not much more. Certainly worth a read if the first 2 books were your cup of tea.

3.8/5

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK, we know by now what to expect from one of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time books. There will be scary AI. There will be some sort of mind-melding thing that messes with your consciousness. There will be abandoned spaceships. And there will definitely be complicated evolutionary histories of species that have developed far beyond their original limits. All is present and correct in Children of Strife, and yet this was easily my least favourite of the series so far - possibly because I'm wondering how far a remix of these original elements was really needed. Children of Strife acts as a kind of primer for those of us who have read the first three books but don't remember them very well: it hops between three time periods in Tchaikovsky's vision of the future, from the age of the early terraformers (Children of Time) to ark ships departing desperately from Earth to seek liveable worlds (Children of Ruin) to later explorers hesitantly discovering weird horrors on these colony planets ( Children of Memory. )

Children of Strife suffers from some of the continuing problems I've had with Tchaikovsky's work. In my opinion, he's at his best when he's writing horror, which is why Children of Ruin/the analogous plot thread in this novel stood out to me, but this also may be because serious horror requires at least somewhat-sympathetic characters to suffer, and so forces Tchaikovsky to move away from his more darkly satirical mode (most problematic in his standalone Alien Clay ) and give us people that aren't just unpleasant or foolish caricatures. The earlier novels in the series worked for me because there was enough of this Tchaikovsky-self to balance out other Tchaikovsky variants (maybe, like Avrana Kern, there are multiple author-versions at play here). This one is out of whack, and ultimately not grounded enough for me in the stories of real people, whether those 'people' are evolved spiders, sentient computers or constructs of a simulation. One saving grace is that the evolutionary biology stuff in this one is at least limited: we do get yet another super-evolved species, stomatopods, but we don't have to hear too much about them. Sadly, though, I'm not sure I'll be reading any more Children of Time novels, although I continue to admire the ambition and sheer weirdness of Tchaikovsky's imagination. 3.5 stars.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

[woof · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well. It was just too long, too repetitive, uninteresting basically all the way through, and overall felt like an unnecessary addition to this series. The thing I really loved about the first three books was the non-human pov and how they’re each facing different challenges and thinking in vastly different ways, and here, the mantis shrimps and the plants growing in vacuum just didn’t feel very exciting or interesting in the face of so much about humans, who were unlikeable and just not interesting to read about. Surprisingly, the second age characters, who make up the last survivors on earth, were the most compelling, yet that entire pov felt so unnecessary to me. We already know that humans escaped earth on ships and made it to the planet through the other ages, and I liked that we weren’t explicitly told what happened so that we, as readers, could piece it together, which we already did! In effect, the entire second age segment is redundant and just makes this book longer for no reason. The plant biology was interesting the first time, and then the same information about it (it grows in vacuum + eats inorganic) is repeated into oblivion, and the mantis shrimps take up such a small part of this book and just don’t feel compelling to me in the way the spiders/octopi/the we/and the corvids were (of which there’s no mention btw, which is disappointing to me as I thought they were the best part of the third book). Instead, I’m reading about how alis is confused and knows nothing the entire book, in a way that is painful to read when, once again, we as the reader already know a lot. Her relationship with mira is also unconvincing to me, partly because she doesn’t remember anything about mira, and partly because she doesn’t remember anything at all. Kott is probably the other mildly interesting character here (but why did she giggle so many times). The people on the planet barely get personalities, so they’re of little consequence. It feels purposefully confusing in a way that is just frustrating mostly. Also, there’s a lot of allusion to alice in wonderland here, and I’d maybe find it more charming if it offered anything interesting to the narrative, but I don’t think it does. Overall, I just don’t understand what this book adds to the series. Nothing, in my opinion, and it doesn’t have any of the charm nor intrigue of the first three.

[Siona Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fun philosophical Tchaikovsky romp through the Kern-iverse. Really loved Cato’s perspective and the planet of Marduk. Portifabian was also a really cool addition to the cast, and I hope there are more novels coming in this series still. Would love to see more non-Earth originated species too, especially since the author referenced panspermia already.

[Shaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three and a half stars

In many ways, this is basically a standard example of a book in this series. There are some fascinating ideas, explorations of the workings of other minds and consciousnesses, and more glimpses of the rather fascinating pan-specific society with all its varied members. In this one, Cato the mantis shrimp takes centre stage for many of these aspects.

On the other hand and again as we might expect from entries in this series, the human characters are all unlikeable and unrelatable and this one excels on that front with a nice bunch of despicable nitwits in the first age sections. There are some neat ideas in this section that I wish were more thoroughly explored in terms of exactly how they work and what the mechanisms are. Without that, the ideas kind of approach fantasy a bit more than science fiction, but ultimately their purpose is to explore other ideas instead and some of those I ended up finding satisfying.

As I will of course complain, the absence of my beloved octopuses in this volume was an immense disappointment and I wouldn't have minded seeing the corvids again. Still, as mentioned, Cato was fun and I enjoyed watching him attempt to punch his way through the pages of this book.

The book is also rather unnecessarily long, somewhat repetitive, and the braided narrative tends to undermine some of the tension.

All that being said, I generally enjoyed reading this and like some of what it's doing.