Children of Strife

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

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

Millennia ago, a maverick terraforming team played God with a distant planet. Now, generations later, scientist Alis wakes to a nightmare while orbiting this same world. Her research vessel discovered the abandoned outpost, but her crew has met with disaster – leaving her stranded with only Cato, the belligerent mantis-shrimp captain, and Kern, the ship’s AI.

Attempting to rescue a missing shipmate, Alis and Cato must descend into the wilderness of the planet below. But the ancient terraformers left something terrifying behind. What horrors did they unleash? And could 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, author of the Commonwealth Saga

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

‘A joy from start to finish. Entertaining, smart, surprising and unexpectedly human’
– Patrick Ness, author of The Knife of Never Letting Go

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

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