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Audiobook details
When the world below doesn't want to let you leave
Far into a future where Earth no longer exists, ark ships have been combing the wreckage of humanity's first expansion, searching for worlds terraformed and abandoned during an age nobody fully remembers. One such ship carries a mixed crew: humans alongside the uplifted Portid spiders and a mantis shrimp captain named Cato with a talent for blunt solutions. They are hunting for lost outposts, and they find one. This world was not shaped by Avrana Kern.
Alis, a human researcher on board, wakes from a nightmare to find most of her crewmates gone. The ship is nearly empty, and the only voices left are Cato's and Kern, the artificial intelligence woven through the vessel's systems. The planet below is alive in ways that cannot be explained by standard terraforming. A rival team worked on it long ago using methods nobody approved, and what they produced is still there, still active, and still spreading.
Children of Strife moves across three interlocking timelines, from the original terraformers to the generations who settled the world to Alis's crew in the present. Each layer adds pieces to what went wrong, and what is still going wrong. It is the fourth entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, a science fiction saga that now spans species, centuries, and the unresolved question of what it costs to create intelligence without taking any responsibility for what it becomes.
I came to this having read the first three books in the series, so I knew what to expect from Tchaikovsky's structure. What I didn't expect was how effectively Children of Strife uses that structure against you. By the time the three timelines started converging, I had stopped trying to predict the outcome and just let it happen.
The book opens with a mystery: Alis wakes up and the crew is gone. That setup sounds simple, but Tchaikovsky immediately complicates it by pulling back to the deep past, to the terraforming team that built this world using methods nobody sanctioned. You understand fairly early that what those engineers created is the reason the crew vanished. What you don't understand, for most of the audiobook, is exactly how.
The Portid characters return, specifically Portia and Fabian navigating something closer to genuine equality than the earlier books allowed. That development feels earned. Cato, the mantis shrimp captain, is the character who stays with you though: belligerent, perceptive, and entirely herself in a way that few non-human characters in fiction manage to be. She's the reason I kept coming back to this audiobook on long drives.
The three-timeline structure is the book's biggest technical risk and its biggest payoff. Tchaikovsky keeps all three moving forward with enough momentum that the switches between periods feel like gear changes rather than interruptions. By the final third, when the timelines collapse into each other, the effect is genuinely disorienting in a way that suits the material.
Mel Hudson has been the voice of this universe since the beginning, and it shows. She handles the non-human characters without making them feel like caricatures, which matters in a book where a mantis shrimp and an uplifted spider carry as much of the narrative as the humans. At 17 hours and 1 minute, this is a long listen, and Hudson earns every one of those hours.
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Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky is the fourth entry in the Children of Time series, published by Orbit and released in March 2026. The story takes place in a far future where Earth has fallen and mixed-species crews search the remains of humanity's terraforming projects. This installment follows Alis, a human researcher, who wakes aboard a near-empty ship to find that almost everyone has vanished, leaving only a mantis shrimp captain and the ship's AI. The structure moves across three interlocked timelines, each one adding another layer to what happened on the planet below.
Take advantage of the free trial, cancellable at any time, and listen to Mel Hudson narrate this 17-hour audiobook. Hudson has voiced every book in the series, and her handling of the non-human characters, including a mantis shrimp captain and a cast of uplifted spiders, is what makes this format the right one for Tchaikovsky's universe.
The audiobook is yours to keep even after the trial ends. The free trial also unlocks access to thousands of other titles across every genre, with no commitment required. Start listening now.
US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
