Children of Strife

They thought they’d found refuge. But paradise became their prison.

The Sunday Times bestselling science-fiction adventure from the master of the genre, Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Centuries ago, a maverick terraforming team played God with a distant planet. Out of their vanity and spite, something terrible and unexpected arose.

Generations later, tormented scientist Alis is among the crew of the research vessel that rediscovers this lost outpost. But Alis wakes from nightmares of her own making to an all-too-real catastrophe on board. The rest of the crew has vanished – leaving only Cato, the belligerent mantis-shrimp captain, and Kern, the ship’s AI.

Searching for their lost fellows, Alis and Cato must venture into the darkness of the planet below. What did those ancient terraformers unleash? And will their last surviving crewmate become a greater threat than the world itself?

The journey that began with Children of Time reaches a new, terrifying frontier in Children of Strife, featuring epic adventure, first contact and the nature of intelligence among the stars.

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Praise for the series:

‘Children of Time has a fabulous sense of scale that only someone as talented as Adrian Tchaikovsky can pull off . . . Very much recommended’
– Peter F. Hamilton

‘Brilliant science fiction and far-out world building’
– James McAvoy

‘A joy from start to finish. Entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human’
– Patrick Ness

‘An exemplar of classic widescreen science fiction’
– New Scientist

Children of Strife was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 30/03/2026.