Book Review: The Children of Strife (Children series book 4) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

5/5 stars. In this fourth installment of his Children series, Tchaikovsky has written another fascinating space opera about an ever-expanding universe with all of Avrana Kern’s uplifted alien species – in fact, we get a new species - mantis shrimp! This story takes place along three timelines around a new terraformed planet called Marduk. We meet a group of scientists in the ‘First Age’ who were contemporaries to Avrana Kern and left Earth before Kern, on a mission to terraform a planet THEIR way, not believing in Kern’s methods. In the ‘Second Age’ we are introduced to a group of the second wave of Earth descendants to leave the dying planet behind in hopes they can discover a a planet that was successfully terraformed by the ‘ancients.’ Finally, we return to the group from the previous book, Children of Memory, plus the new species of Stomatopod, in the ‘Third Age’ as they have discovered Marduk for the first time.

We learn how this group of ancient scientists were able to terraform the planet, despite their conflicting personalities. We watch the second age of explorers leave Earth and find Marduk, meeting an evil presence around the planet. Finally, we watch ‘Kern’ and her compatriots try to make sense of the evilness of the planet as they try to find a missing crew member.

Tchaikovsky is an amazingly prolific writer, publishing multiple novels each year, in multiple genres, but he always creates a fascinating world with interesting characters thrown into unique situations. I always look forward to new novels from him and most of them are powerfully meaningful stories. This is definitely one of those. If you have read his previous Children novels, this one recaptures much of the wonder of the first. Highly recommended!!

 

 

STORY 5

PROSE 5

CHARACTERS 5

ENTERTAINMENT 5