Fiction Reviews
Children of Strife
(2026) Adrian Tchaikovsky, Tor, £25, hrdbk, 679pp, ISBN 978-1-035-05778-8
What if some monstrous love-child of Bezos/Musk/Thiel/whoever actually did manage to escape the surly bonds of Earth and travel to some exo-planet far, far away? And what if they managed to terraform that benighted rock? What would they create, Paradise or Purgatory? These are the starter-questions-for-ten that serve to launch the fourth instalment in Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series, spanning thousands of years but conveniently divided into First, Second and Third Ages across which the story unfolds.
The answer to that last question quickly becomes clear as even with a supporting cast of minions willing to make it so, Tchaikovsky’s fictional tech-bro demigod – one Gerey Hartmand – lacks the requisite insight to create a well-functioning set of interconnected eco-systems and so, fashions a teeming biosphere that reflects his ideology - namely one that is nasty, brutish and short-lived. Unfortunately, Hartmand needs a Paradise, or something close, to accommodate the thousands of followers on their ark-ships that he firmly believes are on their way from a wrecked home-world. That’s when the aptly named pharmaceutically enhanced Pil discovers a way to download the team’s assorted consciousnesses into the nexus of biological interconnectivities below. But, of course, when you do that with a bunch of egos that are so bloated, lacking in empathy and just downright unpleasant, what you end up with is about as far from the Garden of Eden as you can get.
And into this Hellscape a fleeing ark ship does indeed unwittingly arrive, led by Engineer-turned-Captain Lamya Cosimir. She is more than capable of making the hard decisions, of doing what is necessary to save what colonists she can, but of course, she and her crew are no match for Hartmand and co. Who promptly turn from creating, manipulating and destroying entire biological taxa in an endless cycle of internecine carnage, to becoming vengeful deities who must be feared and appeased.
Into this dystopian mix Tchaikovsky then adds a third element: generations later another ship arrives, containing Cato, an evolved mantis shrimp possessing raptorial appendages and a world view that emphasises punching anything that comes within range; Alis, a human researcher psychologically scarred by the events of the previous novel, Children of Memory; Mira, Alis’ therapist who has been consensually incorporated into the Nodan organism which is capable of assimilating everything it comes into contact with; Fabian and Portia, two highly evolved Portiid spiders; and Avrael Kern, an AI offshoot of Avrana Kern, the visionary terraformer of Children of Time and Hartmand’s nemesis (at least in his eyes).
Tchaikovsky skilfully weaves together these distinct strands to arrive at an entirely satisfactory, if not exactly morally ambiguous, conclusion. And he remains adept at conveying the sheer alienness of these diverse life forms, from the spine-shivering creepiness of the Nodan to Cato’s aggression-based Stromatopod origins. That can’t quite be said of his characterisations of Hartmand and his right-, left- and whatever-handed people, all of whom come across as rather obvious caricatures (which wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have to spend so long in their deeply unpleasant company).
That said, there are comeuppances a-plenty by the end and Tchaikovsky remains a master at portraying a galaxy-spanning saga that unfolds at both planetary and personal levels.
Steven French
See Mark's review of Children of Strife.
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