I just finished Children of Strife. I'll give a short, spoiler-free review, then I want to talk about the series a bit.

Review

If you, like me, were disappointed by Children of Memory, I think you will find this more enjoyable. There's a lot more going on and the mantis shrimp, Cato, is much more compelling than I expected. And Tchaikovsky's language seems especially vivid, though he does seem to repeat himself a bit.

I'll warn you that beginning of the book is pretty rough. We're let in through two perspective characters that are a mixture of boring and unpleasant -- someone who had been stuck in a simulation for a long time and a terraformer from the age of excess. Tchaikovsky uses these characters to moralize in an exceptionally tiresome and unsubtle way: "You see, the simulation just showed her what she expected to see! (LIKE AI. DO YOU GET IT, IT'S LIKE AI.) Also, this terraformer and her colleagues are baaad people. They've got big egos and they're not nice! (LIKE CONTEMPORARY BILLIONAIRES. THEY'RE THE SAME.)" But stick with it, it gets better.

Overall, I enjoyed the experience of reading this book. It might even be the second best book in the series; it's a near tie with Children of Ruin.

Series commentary (spoilers)

I simultaneously find this series to be some of the best SF of the past decade, and also every book seems to be composed of at least 50% stuff I didn't want to read about.

Children of Time: Much as Star Trek IV is "the one with the whales", this is "the one with the intelligent spiders". But it's also about humans being dumb and bad every other chapter, which I think most people agree is rather tedious. I do however love the payoff of the human plot -- that joining a civilization with spiders is basically what makes Star Trek possible. Very cool! I enjoy this book and I recommend it to people, but I tell them that they can skim the human chapters if they feel like it.

Children of Ruin: Hell yeah, time for octopodes in space! Except... The half of the plot that takes place in the past doesn't spend much time on the creation of octopodes because it's really super interested in some memory snot they found, and the half of the plot that takes place in the present is about a crew of spiders and humans who don't really know how to get close to or communicate with the octopodes they encounter in space, so the book spends somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of the plot keeping us from the octopodes as best it can. I like this book but wished it was more like Children of Time and allowed us to see octopus culture develop more gradually and intimately.

Children of Memory: This one has cool crows! Don't get too excited; there is one chapter about the cool crows' origin story and then an interminable plot about the memory snot being stuck in Sim City: Space Colonist Edition. Nothing makes sense! Isn't it cool how nothing makes sense? Again and again without any real content or meaning? It's like a single TOS episode stretched to three hours. The spiders, octopodes, and even post-contact humans don't even meaningfully appear in this story.

Children of Strife: There's so much going on in this one! Evil billionaire terraformers download their minds into an ecosystem, a lady who was stuck in a simulation tries to remember that reality is real, two spiders in one robot body try to figure out how to share a mouth, and the memory snot struggles to remember the OC they made up before it goes full Akira. In the midst of all of that is a dramatic, empathetic portrait of a single mantis shrimp warrior struggling to adapt to a new age of peace. He gets a few lines and moments here and there until once again: a single chapter where we get an infodump that contains literally everything I actually wanted out of the book. (And forget about the octopodes or the crows, they're not here. They must be too expensive to render.)

This series makes me feel crazy. I get that Tchaikovsky is doing a lot of cool stuff with consciousness and that it's thematically related. I don't even think it's bad fodder for SF novels. But to me, the big idea at the heart of these books is that the creatures on our planet are the aliens and it's cool to think about how they experience the universe and how they might participate in civilization with us. Which leads me to ask: so why won't the books just let me hang out with them instead of spending so much time on memory snot having an identity crisis!