Children of Strife

Part of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of series, this novel interweaves three timelines across thousands of years to tell the story of a terraformed world gone horribly wrong, the people trapped on it, and the misfits who arrive to confront its legacy.

In the First Age, a five-person terraforming crew orbits an unnamed planet aboard a space station called the Pancreator. Gerey Hartmand, a vainglorious tech mogul who fled Earth after losing a corporate war with rival terraformer Avrana Kern, controls the station's AI, robots, and life support, giving him unchecked authority. His crewmates are geoscientist Sui Dorcheson, biotech eccentric Ken Pil, sycophantic cybernetics specialist Ottis Milner, and Redina Kott, a sardonic industrial espionage specialist. Their plan to seed the planet with engineered microbes has failed six times. Pil secretly applies Kott's self-evolving data architecture to the planetary microbiome, creating a runaway feedback loop in which organisms begin communicating and evolving at astonishing speed, bypassing human oversight. The biosphere takes hold but stubbornly produces only giant insects. Dorcheson repeatedly poisons them into extinction, yet they always return. After a sham trial, Pil is confined to quarters, but he has already established a secret biological link to the planet through fungal growth on the station's hull. Believing the biosphere functions as a planetary-scale biological computer that a human mind could steer, Pil sedates Kott without her consent and connects her consciousness to it. In this "Conflated" state, a direct mental merger with the biosphere, Kott experiences godlike awareness and redirects evolution toward vertebrates.

The crew establishes a rotation for Conflation, but their minds bleed into one another, and each resents sharing. Decades-old transmissions reveal Earth collapsing into war, and a final electronic kill-switch virus shuts down the Pancreator's systems. Through Conflation, Kott force-evolves biological replacements for air, water, and power, but Pil has been secretly poisoning everyone's moods through the biosphere, driving them toward despair. Kott finds him dead by his own hand; he left a message declaring that the pantheon of gods they have become will only ruin what they created. She claims his key innovation, a polarized-light communication channel invisible to the biosphere, as her own. Using Pil's method, each crew member secretly prepares to upload their consciousness into the planet permanently. When the station's hull breaches, all four die physically but find themselves trapped together as competing gods, locked in cycles of predation through animal avatars: Hartmand in lion-like predators, Dorcheson in armored boars, Milner in swarming rodents, Kott in small carnivores, and Pil's fragmented ghost in the ever-resurgent insects. For thousands of years they torment one another, and when an ark ship eventually arrives, they agree to let its colonists live as playthings.

The Second Age follows that ark ship, the Marduk, launched from a dying Earth centuries after the terraformers' civilization collapsed. Captain Lamya Cosimir leads the ship's senior officers, called Key Crew: Security Chief Denizon Kieraven, Engineering Chief Anbar Ilshir, Science Chief Hieron, and Classicist Bartilow. After a centuries-long transit during which 17 percent of their suspended passengers die, they arrive at a verdant, breathable world dominated by the Beanstalk, a single enormous organism extending from the planet's surface into orbit. Hieron explores the Beanstalk's central hub and finds plant-preserved mummies of the original terraformers. She brings samples aboard, but the organism infiltrates the Marduk, consuming metals and replacing structural elements with its own tissue at catastrophic speed. Over 48 hours, Cosimir coordinates a desperate evacuation. Ilshir and Hieron die as the plant overwhelms their positions. Cosimir and Bartilow escape on the last shuttle. On the surface, Kieraven organizes survivors into a colony under the hostile watch of chimeric beasts with semi-human faces, the first avatars of the gods.

The Third Age follows Alis, a Human researcher from the Panspecific community, a multi-species interstellar civilization encompassing Humans, Portiid spiders, Octopuses, and others. Alis spent a subjective lifetime inside a vast alien simulation machine on a world called Imir and emerged unable to distinguish reality from illusion. She has been placed aboard the Dissenter, a ship of social misfits, under the care of a therapist named Mira. When roused from a therapeutic coma, Alis finds only two companions: Cato, a pugnacious Stomatopod (mantis shrimp) captain and war veteran, and Avigael Kern, a hived-off instance of the ancient AI Avrana Kern. The rest of the crew investigated this system's terraformed planet and lost contact after a distress call. Inside the orbiting Marduk, they discover dead crewmates and recover a damaged spider robot containing the merged consciousness of two Portiid spiders, Portia and Fabian, fused into a single entity called Portifabian.

On the planet's surface, a parallel narrative follows an entity that initially believes itself to be Alis but gradually realizes it is Mira, who is actually a colony of the Nodan microbial organism, a species capable of recording and replicating the personalities of its hosts. Unlike a typical Nodan, Mira had constructed a unique personal identity rather than simply copying a host's. Attacked by the planet's ecosystem, which treats her as an invasive pathogen, Mira loses control. Her base Nodan nature consumes local biomass, and when settlers from Four Dragon Ford, descendants of the Marduk's colonists, attack her, she absorbs several people, including the hunter Neco Kasmar, preserving Neco's personality within herself.

The Dissenter crew descends to the planet in a drop ship and makes hostile contact with Four Dragon Ford, whose people live under constant persecution by what they call the Life, not realizing it consists of uploaded human minds. Kott perceives Cato through the polarized-light network visible only to his Stomatopod eyes, hacks his communications, and tries to manipulate him into destroying Mira. When Kern reestablishes contact, Kott alerts Hartmand to Kern's presence, triggering a massive mobilization of monsters. Alis enters Mira's territory and learns Mira is losing the fight against her own expanding nature. Mira passes Neco's preserved persona into Alis for safekeeping, then pulls Alis into her mass.

Cato is a survivor of the Escalation, a catastrophic intra-species conflict that killed all but 72 of hundreds of thousands of traditionalist Stomatopods. He reaches Mira's boundary armed with a laser cutter. When Alis emerges and steps into his killing zone, Cato performs the hardest act of his life: He curls in submission and does not strike. His restraint proves decisive. Mira uses Cato's extraordinary eyes as a gateway into the polarized-light network connecting the gods' consciousness. She broadcasts herself into the planet's information space, becoming a presence vastly more powerful than any individual god, and offers the pantheon a choice: leave voluntarily or be forced out. Kern uploads Portifabian into the drop ship as its controlling intelligence and taunts Hartmand to draw his beast army away from the settlement, while Kott unleashes her creatures against Hartmand's forces. Kott accepts Mira's offer first, declaring herself sick of the eternal cycle. Milner and Dorcheson follow. Pil requests dissolution. Hartmand rages but stands alone.

In the aftermath, Mira dismantles her expanded biomass and promises the settlers a kinder world. Neco receives a new body and joins the Panspecific community. Portifabian embraces their existence as an independent AI. The disembodied gods are transported to Imir and placed in the simulation machine, where they can inhabit unlimited virtual worlds. Kott alone requests a real body so she can try to be a useful person; Mira grants her wish. Hartmand, having refused all offers, is left in a single deteriorating monster body on the planet. Starving and alone, the last self-proclaimed god dies in isolation on a barren mountainside.