BOOK REVIEW - CHILDREN OF STRIFE
👥 Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
📚 Series: Children of Time [4]
📅 Started: 2026-07-15
📅 Finished: 2026-07-17
💎 Rating: 10/10
Blurb: 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?
Review: This series really is Adrian Tchaikovsky at his best, tbh. This book perfectly slots into the Children of Time series as well! It does have a slow start, since it's balancing three storylines at once - a past group of original terraformers/annoying tech bros who think they're gods; the post-armageddon ark ship of refugees going to that same planet; and a ragtag crew of misfits that encounter that planet in the present.
I really love how this not only introduces new concepts to the series like distributed uploaded intelligence, but it also takes previous concepts from the series and expands on them in big ways! In fact, the entire crew of the Dissenter in the present timeline touches on different aspects of the previous three books which is really cool. Cato (mantis shrimp), Portia and Fabian (spiders), and Kern (ship AI) take aspects of Children of Time, Mira from Children of Ruin and Alis from Children of Memory. I love them too, it's a great cast of characters. My favourite is Cato though, and I also liked that we got some more details on the mantis shrimp and their civilisation!
Also, I guess this book is also a commentary on that kind of "tech bro" culture because the original terraformers are all incredibly self-centred, annoying, with no regard for human life or decency or kindness, and they resemble the kind of people we have on Earth pretty well tbh. Their first thought upon seeing the cataclysmic events on Earth was "damn I wish I was there so I could take advantage of it and make more money".
Anyway, I inhaled this book once I started it, it's a pretty easy read despite being one of Tchaikovsky's denser books. I really loved it. Compared to the other books in the series, I would put this above Children of Memory and on-par with Children of Ruin. Still, nothing surpasses the original Children of Time.
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