Children of Strife Quotes

“Perhaps sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“Except he has seen the cost of fighting. The most bitter of all lessons”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“A moulting mantis shrimp bearded in its burrow was more than capable of putting on a ferocious show of aggression to cover for the fact its shell was still soft. Deception is a part of conflict. Sun Tzu would have gone down very well with the Stomatopods, had his writings somehow filtered down to them.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“There was an old story, about a garden. The place these travellers had come from probably wasn’t any kind of Eden, or why would they have left it? But Kott knew damn well what they were descending into was going to be hell. A world that wanted them to dance for its amusement. A world that would take suffering as entertainment.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“It is a peculiar driver of intelligence and complex behaviour, to be able to kill another member of your own species very easily. It worked for humans, from the moment they thought to pick up a rock.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“She was good in support, in her personal opinion. She could take things that other people created and repurpose them, dismantle them, reconstruct them in interesting ways. Put her own name on them and take credit, where possible. But she was a child of Earth’s informational ecology, a parasite that lived beneath the skin of giants’ shoulders.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“There had been a trial. Of course there had. Hartmand loved trials. Oh, he’d not much loved those he’d been defendant for back on Earth; he just loved playing judge. That unassailable position of power, the infinite capacity to interpret events in his own favour. Judge, and also prosecutor, but not jury, oh no. That would have been unjust.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“Because Here be dragons would always be better than Here be nothing.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“The Stomatopods were forced to endure being considerably more comfortable in space, via the offices of a species who were their cultural devils.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“No Stomatopod would go into any situation without the ability to kill every single other entity there, just as a matter of courtesy. Honestly, if an opponent arrived with nothing but open hands and a smile, that would be an insult. Cato wishes to be a threat, and be considered a threat, otherwise how can anyone take him seriously?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“I always wondered what wild looked like.” Then, after a moment of shared contemplation, “It looks back. I didn’t expect that.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“He is distantly aware that Humans—or at least lower-case-h humans—are the origin point of all of this. His people, the Portiids, all the rest (with one exception) derive from human science. Having met Humans, he can only assume they lost a great deal over the intervening millennia. They seem a hapless and poorly designed species.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“It is a peculiar driver of intelligence and complex behaviour”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“Intelligence is not necessarily a great evolutionary boon. Large brains”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“In spider parlance, not ‘oral tradition’ of course. A concept more akin to ‘history by foot’.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“Their long-dead ancestors had wanted their descendants to know that”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife

“I was Avrana Kern, says Kern—or not, apparently, Avrana Kern—after a pause.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife