Book Review: Children of Strife

“One advantage of having your mind uploaded into an ecosystem should have been that you didn’t end up in stupid meetings…”

An impossibility and a down to earth observation, delivered in the same sentence.

If you haven’t read Adrian Tchaikovsky before, this is what you should expect, the impossible married to the ordinary, presented in a way that doesn’t require you to read a dictionary to comprehend it.

There’s a useful primer at the beginning of the book that explains the different ages of time and the characters within, but to be honest, relying on that to give you the background needed to understand the book is like watching Aliens and wondering how the Queen got there when there were only eggs in the chamber…

Take my advice on this, take the time to read the other books first, you won’t regret it.

This is another multigenerational story, weaving things from past and future together into a coherent tapestry that delivers a satisfying completion, all the characters have motivations and purpose, even if in some cases those purposes aren’t entirely comprehensible from a human perspective, and every time zone is a story in itself, but jumping backwards and forwards in time gives the information that’s relevant to the next age when its needed rather than trying to read it in order. 

There’s a growing sense of disquiet in the narrative as things progress, seeing in real time the consequences of things done in the first age coming to pass in the third, watching what you already know will go bad being done with the best of intentions and then seeing how it changes as the knowledge that no one had at the time becomes evident and everyone tries to make it right.  In many ways, it mirrors the world today, as we look at events unfolding, thinking that we’d know how they’d turn out and then looking at the screen every day and wondering how it could have all gone so wrong, hoping that tomorrow will be better, never knowing if we’ll see those better times.

This continues the excellence of the first three books, and that’s why I say read them first, because the involvement level in reading this is total, it’s not a casual read or one that you’d read a little of and then come back to. 

Thanks to Pan Macmillan and the Author for the Free ARC, my views are my own, no incentive offered or accepted.