Understanding the future through speculative fiction, insights with Adrian Tchaikovsky

Great interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky, who is the author of the acclaimed 10-book Shadows of the Apt series starting with Empire in Black and Gold published by Tor UK. His other works for Tor UK include standalone novels Guns of the Dawn and Children of Time and the Echoes of the Fall series starting withThe Tiger and the Wolf. Other major works include Dogs of War, Redemption’s Blade, Cage of Souls, the Tales of the Apt collections and the novellas The Bloody Deluge (in Journal of the Plague Year) and Even in the Cannon’s Mouth (in Monstrous Little Voices) and Ironclads for Rebellion.  He has won the Arthur C Clarke and Robert Holdstock awards.

What is your background?

I studied zoology and psychology at university, and then ended up working in law through a series of bizarre coincidences.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

The law stuff? Not really. In that the “background” really arises out of the writing instead of the other way round. I got into zoo & psych because I’ve always been interested in the natural world (as my writing shows) and in behavioural science, and the legal career came from a long chain of events that began with me seeking a job as a secretary because I had the typing speed required from my writing habits.

1 min pitch for what you are working on now?

Right now is a project I’m calling The Brain Garden (subject to change by editors!) – amateur cryptozoologists encounter monstrous beasts on Bodmin Moor; strange almost-human agents spar with the British security forces, an icy intelligence from a dead Earth reaches out to the living. The Earth has born intelligent life many times, in many timelines, but now the boundaries between them are blurring. Is this a threat to humanity and its dominance of the Earth, or is it much, much worse…

You’ve written a few different types of books, for different publishers, are you a bit like John Banville, Ruth Rendell and other writers who like to explore a few different styles/genres, and have the freedom to do this through different types of books?

I think the answer to that is whether you consider SF and fantasy to be poles apart or basically the same thing. From up close, I feel I cover a lot of ground within those genres, from epic fantasy through to relatively hard science-y SF. I do tend to stick within those more fantastical genres though.

Speculative fiction is a really interesting place to be situated, do you feel we are at a rich time for this type of work? & how do you manage when real events often overtake speculative fiction?

To take the last first, it’s something of a terrifying time to write SF, especially near future SF, because global events are moving so rapidly, and so unpredictably, that it’s entirely possible that things you haven’t even thought of, that go into the background of a novel, will be utterly out of date by the time it comes out. You just have to take your best guess and hang on, and hope events don’t shake you loose. For the first, I think that it’s always an interesting time for speculative fiction, because no matter what’s happening, SF and fantasy are invaluable tools to hold a (slightly distorted) mirror up to the world and tilt it back and forth to see what’s around the edges and what might be different.

We love JG Ballard, who often walked an interesting line between ‘now’ suburban distopias and wildly inventive dysfunctional futures. Who are your heroes, if any?

Gene Wolfe, Ursula le Guin, Mary Gentle, Mervyn Peake: writers with a wealth of invention and a style I can frankly only envy. More recently, Justina Robson, China Mieville, Emma Newman are writing profoundly fascinating stuff.

Rex, the main character in Dogs of War has a lot of lovability, do you own a dog? In many ways you captured the seeming essential doglike nature of a dog, to want to receive positive feedback, to chase things, and do what his master tells him. Question do you think bioforms like Rex are 1. possible? & 2. advisable?

So the thing is, I’m not actually a dog person. When I was a kid I practically had a phobia about dogs, though a few workplaces where the senior partner brought his dogs in cured me of that. However, the psychology and behaviour of dogs is truly fascinating, and I’d read quite a few articles about the latest in canine psych which gave me a real window onto how something/one like Rex might think. As for possible – I suspect we probably could, though, as Hart says, we’d have to ruin a lot of dogs to get there. As for advisable, I honestly don’t know. I think that if we *did* do it, we’d run right into all the legal and moral issues in the book, though.

Dogs of War, reviewed

How can people find out more about you & your work?

I have a website, currently shadowsoftheapt.com, which I’m not the best at keeping up to date. I’m also on Twitter as @aptshadow and will generally answer anything thrown at me by either route.

Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?

Upcoming work: This year I’ve got 3 new books out! Cage of Souls is a book about the end of the world as seen from the inside of a prison on a dying Earth, coming out April. In May the sequel to Children of Time, being Children of Ruin, is out, and so is a new novella, Walking to Aldabaran, about an astronaut lost inside an impossible alien object out around the orbit of Pluto.

This is all very flattering. March 20th in London. https://t.co/Froa1o58MG

— Adrian Tchaikovsky (@aptshadow) February 25, 2019

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