A missing crew, a troubled planet and a belligerent mantis-shrimp captain: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Strife has a setup that does not need much assistance from a marketing department.
The fourth Children of Time novel reaches its UK publication date today, March 26. For readers interested in minds that do not simply behave like humans wearing unusual hats, the premise offers plenty to investigate.
This is a spoiler-light introduction to the book and its place in the series, rather than a claim to have read and rated the entire novel.
Captain Cato Has a Problem
The publisher’s synopsis describes a distant world altered by an old terraforming project. A research expedition rediscovers it, but scientist Alis wakes to a catastrophe: most of the crew has disappeared. Her remaining companions include Cato, the mantis-shrimp captain, and the ship’s AI, Kern.
Finding the missing crew means confronting the world below and the legacy of its makers. That is enough of the setup to establish the attraction without explaining the mystery before you have opened the book.
A dangerous captain and an alarming planet are familiar science-fiction ingredients. Making the captain a mantis shrimp adds a particularly good reason to respect personal space.
Biology as a Starting Point for Imagination
The series asks what civilization and communication might look like when the minds involved differ from our own. Its earlier adventures brought spiders and octopuses into that conversation; Cato gives the new book another perspective.
That is an imaginative exercise, not a claim that real animal biology straightforwardly predicts a spacefaring society. A novelist can begin with a creature’s senses or behavior and build far beyond what the scientific evidence establishes.
Readers drawn to the communication problems discussed in our look at Project Hail Mary may recognize the appeal. Different stories can start from the same difficult question: what would it take to understand an intelligence unlike our own?
The fictional question is more inviting: how do you cooperate with someone whose assumptions, signals and priorities are not yours? Translating the words may be the easy part.
Try the Opening Before Taking the Voyage
The U.S. publisher, Orbit, provides an official excerpt. Its opening introduces the earlier terraforming project through a tense group of people whose impressive resources have not eliminated vanity, rivalry or blame.
It is a useful sample of the book’s approach: ambitious plans for a world, paired with personalities that make you wonder whether the planning meeting went especially well.
Reading a sample is also more informative than an anonymous claim that a novel is a universal “return to form.” Readers can disagree about a series, and somebody else disliking the previous installment is not a reason to treat it as disposable.
Where It Fits on the Shelf
The series order is:
- Children of Time
- Children of Ruin
- Children of Memory
- Children of Strife
Starting with Children of Time is the straightforward route for a new reader. It lets the setting and its ideas accumulate in publication order. There is no need to spoil Memory’s central mystery—or tell you to skip it—to explain where Strife belongs.
The UK edition is published by Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan; the listing gives 704 pages. The U.S. edition is from Orbit, with a March 17 publication date. Edition details can differ by market and format.
If you enjoy science fiction about how different kinds of minds might understand one another, that is the reason to look closer. If your initial interest is simply “tell me more about the mantis-shrimp captain,” that is an entirely respectable boarding pass too.
