The Bleak Prospect of Survival of the Richest

It’s unsurprising that Children of Time remains Adrian Tchaikovsky's best-known science fiction novel. It has sweeping ideas, a unique perspective on the future, and a well of empathy. It’s a Clarke Award-winning space opera about a dying earth, hyperevolved jumping spiders, and cross-species communication. It’s an impressive feat of worldbuilding -- and of exploring alternate cognitions.

Children of Strife, the fourth
of Adrian Tchaikovsky's
Children of Time books.
(Image via goodreads)

The novel has two strong follow ups: Children of Ruin in 2019 and Children of Memory in 2022. Subsequently, the series was honoured at the 81st World Science Fiction Convention with a Hugo Award for Best Series. Unfortunately, due to the numerous much-publicized issues with that year’s Hugo Awards, many in the SFF community — including Tchaikovsky himself — consider any award from that year to be tarnished.

The Hugo Award for Best Series cannot be awarded twice to the same series. Having won in 2023, Children of Time is not eligible in 2027, which is a shame because the recently-published Children of Strife makes the best case yet for why these novels deserve recognition as a series that is greater than the sum of its parts.,

Set over the course of millennia, the first book follows terraforming scientist Avrana Kern, the civilization of spiders that evolves on the world she’s working to create, and a band of refugee humans fleeing a collapsing Earth millennia after Kern’s project started.

Each of the sequels centres on a crew of Humans and Spiders visiting long-lost terraforming projects. With Children of Ruin, we were introduced to sentient octopuses, and Children of Memory brought us the delightful Gethy and Gothly, a pair of Ravens who share one cooperative consciousness.

What connects the books in this series isn’t tied to a shared set of characters — or some grand galactic plot arc — but rather an intellectual playfulness and positivity in imagining how a variety of sophonts might understand the world around them.

This latest book, however, mirrors the original Children of Time more closely than the other two; and in doing so offers a dark reflection on the ideas that Tchaikovsky was exploring. Children of Strife depicts a terraforming project led not by the government-funded Avrana Kern, but by her rival Gerey Hartmand — an Elon Musk-type figure who self-finances his own, self-selected experiments.

While Kern’s World evolves species who learn to cooperate, the arch-capitalist Hartmand and his four allies are focused on a reductive survival-of-the-fittest approach to their project, with a hierarchical governance model. To describe the world that Hartmand creates as “flawed” might be an understatement. When Earth collapses some millennia later, one of the ships of refugees is sent to Hartmand’s World.

Hartmand’s cadre of flunkies: Sui Dorcheson, Ken Pill, Redina Kott, and Milner, all seem to embody different aspects of real-world tech-bro disconnection from reality. The god-complex of Hartmand, the pharmaceutical haze of Pill, the nihilism of Kott. Over the course of the book, they each represent different ways in which reductive understandings of evolution can lead to terrible outcomes.

The pugilistic nature of the Mantis Shrimp
(aka Stomatopod) makes for an interesting
protagonist in Children of Strife.
(Image by Roy Caldwell via UC Berkley)

These corporatist terraformers embody a grim reflection of the idealistic experiment begun by Avrana Kern in Children of Time. Kern’s project sought to guide evolution toward intelligence, motivated by a flawed but sincere vision of uplifting life. The terraformers in Children of Strife, by contrast, pursue profit and control, reshaping worlds with little regard for ecological balance or emergent societies. Where Kern hoped to steward a new civilization, the corporatists reduce planets to personal playgrounds. There’s some unsubtle subtext about how our modern plutocrat class dreams of being worshiped as gods while people are sacrificed for their entertainment.

As with every previous book in the series, Tchaikovsky explores the ethology and cognition of a real-world species. For Children of Strife, this is Kato, an obstreperous space captain descended from stomatopods (sometimes referred to as “mantis shrimp”). As always, this is an interesting aspect of the book, although Kato is more difficult and more inhuman in perspective than many of the previous protagonists in the series.

Children of Time remains a modern classic of space opera; a best-selling book replete with engaging ideas that continue to resonate with audiences a decade after its publication. Children of Strife elevates the series by having something new to say about the failures of reductionist adaptationism as a view of evolution — and how that is reflected in failures of societies governed by capitalist competition and hierarchy.

It is now easier to see these books as a series, rather than one great book with enjoyable-enough sequels. If it were eligible for the Hugo for Best Series in 2027, we would vote for it. Children of Time books will forever live in a liminal space of having sort-of won the Hugo for Best Series, but never bear the words “Hugo-winning series” on their covers.

Children of Strife is the best — and most ambitious — sequel yet to Children of Time, in part because Tchaikovsky has the courage to subvert the optimism and hope underpinning the first novel.