No, nothing to do with the Varley story at all.
Here’s kind of how it works. The premise is as described in the OP. After you drop the “seeds” on the planets you have chosen, you see the entire future of that species on this wheel/timeline display with various “crisis points” highlighted. (I may be misremembering the terminology here, it’s been a while since I played.) You can then travel through time to any of the crisis points to try to resolve it.
You interact with the species through an “android” agent. The agent looks exactly like the species in question but knows about you. You communicate with it and discuss the current crisis and tell it how you want to resolve it. This takes the form of a back-and-forth conversation where you have several options of what you want to say. Each option leads the conversation down a different path.
As an example of a crisis (and I think this is more-or-less how one of them went) you might find that a species has developed a warrior code where combat is encouraged and two nations are about to go to war; a war that will destroy their civilization. You can do several things. You can give one side a weapon that will give them overwhelming superiority over the other, you can encourage a peace movement that will prevent the war or you can encourage them to redirect their warrior code into another direction (hunting a dangerous carnivore instead of fighting.)
Suppose you select the peace movement. You may find that this results in the founding of a new religion dedicated to peace. The religion stifles all development and the civilization falls into a dark age and never advances.
Now, you can go to a key point in the development of the religion and make changes. You can encourage a more moderate branch of the “church” to come into power or you can take matters into your own hand and directly assassinate the high priest.
If you assassinate the priest, you may turn him into a martyr and touch off a holy war which destroys civilization again.
Or, you could go back to the earlier point and instead of encouraging the peace movement you can try redirecting their code. This could lead you to a path where the carnivore is hunted into extinction which causes an ecological imbalance which leads to the destruction of the ecology of the planet. Now, you can attempt to start a conservation movement before the carnivore is wiped out, or you may learn that the carnivore is in danger of extinction because of the discovery of a new weapon (like the bow and arrow say) and you can remove the weapon by stealing the prototype and insuring that it is never developed. This leads to…
You get the idea. There is a huge branching tree of cause-and-effects and you apparently have to find just the right combination of choices to get through it. And you have to do this for each of the four species. The crisis points seem different every game (though you do see the same ones coming over over several games) and there is apparently a random factor involved so a simple trial-and-error try everything approach would take a long time.
Complicating matter more, if the species take too long to develop, an evil fifth species develops and wipes out everyone.
To expand on the victory conditions described above…
There are two “goals” to the game. The first is to prevent the fifth species from winning by getting each of the four species you are responsible for to develop to the point where they have space travel and expand to each occupy about a quarter of the galaxy.
The other goal involves the fact that your ship cannot get you back home. In order to do so, you need four devices, one from each species. However, in order to advance to the point where they can create the device, that species also advances enough that they are able to take over the entire galaxy on their own, eliminating the other three.
So, you really have to win the game five times! You have to get each species to its maximum level one at a time so that you can get the device they create (which requires advancing one while hindering the others), then you have to get all of them to advance at about the same rate so that they each have a balanced share of the galaxy (which requires you to help them enough for them to advance but not enough for any one to outpace the others).
Oh yeah, there’s also an “evil” version of you from an alternate timeline who is working against you. Just to keep things from being too easy.
There are a few negatives. When you interact with your agents you do so through a monitor that shows the agent talking to you. The agents speak in their “alien” language and hearing them babble on gets old and you spend a lot of time hitting the space bar (I think it was) to cut them off to get to the next sentence. Also, every time you do something the game shows an animation (an antenna extending when you communicate; engines firing up when you move and so on) and this gets really old really fast. At least you can turn them off in the preferences.
Again, I really like the idea behind game but it isn’t easy. Hmmm… Guess I need to drag my copy out and try it again. (I’ve been on a nostalgia gaming spree lately anyway.)