Children of Strife

I did not much care for this. It was a chore finishing it.

The good thing: he has a very ambitious storytelling structure, telling three stories separated by hundreds of years that all converge into how one particular planet is terraformed and colonized. And it's a pretty inventive and interesting story. I also liked the characters and setup of some of the earlier action.

Unfortunately the most recent timeline ends up being the dominant story. And it is not to my liking. The main problem is I didn't like any of the characters, all very weird intelligences. And one of them's entire shtick is he likes to hit things violently, his society is based in one-on-one combat. This did not make good for story telling.

It was reasonably well written though. Tchaikovsky's prolific output astonishes me but the quality isn't suffering. I think this book's problem was just a concept I didn't like.