Leticia Lara interviews Adrian Tchaikovsky

Leticia Lara has interviewed science fiction and fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky and has been so kind as to letting us publish the English version here, on Sense of Wonder. Remember that you can read the translation into Spanish at Leticia's wonderful blog, Fantástica Ficción. Enjoy!

Leticia Lara: Your novel Children of Time has been published in Spain as Herederos del tiempo and in the future we will also see Spiderlight translated. What do you think about getting published in our country? Can you tell us something about the translation process?   

Adrian Tchaikovsky: I’m absolutely delighted that I’m now published in Spanish, and it’s especially nice to see Spiderlight get the attention. I visited Spain for the Celsius festival a few years back and was delighted by the enthusiasm and energy of the fantasy fans there, and I’ve been desperate to get into print in Spanish ever since.

LL: Recently, you have announced the beginning of your new career as a full-time writer. How did you manage to write so much while still working as a lawyer? Have you noticed any difference in the way you write now?

AT: I think my natural writing style tends to be fairly economical – I don’t do a lot of multiple drafts or re-writing, but try to get things as prepared as possible before I embark on a book, meaning, hopefully, I can use my time efficiently. I am also lucky enough to write well late in the evening.

LL: This year you are going to publish three books (that we know of…): Cage of Souls, Children of Ruin and Walking to Aldebaraan. (Seriously, when did you invent the time-travel machine?). Maybe the most waited-for is the sequel to Children of Time but... what can you tell us about the three of them?

So Children of Ruin is indeed the sequel to Children of Time, and picks up from the hook in the very last epilogue chapter of that book, with the expedition to another terraforming site. Cage of Souls is a very different book – and the write-up on Amazon that my editor provided is probably a better pitch for it than anything I could do, but it’s a book set in the far future when the world is simultaneously dying and erupting with new life. The hero is a political dissenter sent to a prison out in the hostile jungles, and from there he gets to watch his world fall apart. Plus lots of monsters and some duels and murders. Walking to Aldabaraan is a novella about an astronaut who is sent as part of a team to investigate a bizarre alien object out around the orbit of Pluto, and who gets lost inside its impossible interior, which defies time and space. He’s trying to get home but he’s beginning to understand that if he does, neither his home nor himself may be the same as they were.

LL: Some of your books have an audiobook version. For example, Guns of the Dawn was performed by the wonderful Emma Newman. What do you think about this way of reading?

AT: I have become a big fan of audiobooks myself, and I’ve been very lucky that everyone picked to read one of mine has done a really good job of it. Audiobooks for me are a great way to re-experience books that I’ve read on paper because the narrator’s voice adds so much additional context.

LL: Are spiders your “trademark” as a writer? They seem to appear in different ways in a lot of your books. 

AT: I am very fond of spiders, although I’m also fond of arthropods in general, plus octopuses, reptiles and just about anything else that most people don’t like. Spiders have proved to be a particularly useful tool to write about because, of all Creatures, they are probably the most despised by most people. Hence if you want shorthand for an outsider or something inhuman, spiders are a Good bet.

LL: In Spiderlight you take the preconceptions readers may have about the classic D&D partyRedemption's Blade the story starts at an unusual point: the Big Bad Guy has been already defeated and the characters try to find a sense of purpose. These are very far from what one usually expects about this genre. What are you trying to achieve by introducing these changes into a classic fantasy story?
and you twist them with the introduction of a wild card. In

AT: Well, first off, the regular way of telling epic fantasy stories – Good defeats evil in a big fight – has been done a lot, and the one thing I do feel I have to try for is originality. Hence I love fantasy stories, but I want to give them my own spin. Also traditional fantasy (at least the post-Tolkien wave of the 80’s and 90’s, say) had many Works that didn’t really examine the implications of the worlds they were setting up – characterising everything as Good or evil means that Good gets to slaughter evil without remorse, and in both Spiderlight and Redemption’s Blade I really wanted to deconstruct this genre tradition and challenge it a bit. 

LL: Dogs of War and Ironclads are two novellas set on a near future. Both present to the reader possible problems of warfare-applied technology. However, Children of Time is set in the far future, Earth is not a relevant scenario and the spotlight is shared between a ragtag assortment Humanity's leftovers and a brand new species and its evolutionary road. What kind of science fiction do you like the best to write? 

(NOTE: Dogs of War is a full novel, albeit a shorter one)

AT: Honestly it’s a matter of letting the key concept of the book dictate the setting. Children of Time could only be a far future book because the spider evolution needed time to work. Ironclads and Dogs of War are both very much about the Now – our attitudes to wealth and privilege, to class and service and to the immediate future of humanity, hence if they’d been set in the far future they wouldn’t have the same impact.

LL: You've written many different books besides the previously mentioned like Guns of the Dawn a sort of Pride, Prejudice and Women at War, the Echoes of the Fall trilogy and the very impressive Shadows of the Apt (10 novel plus short stories!). At this rate, you'll end up writing on every format and about every main topic in science fiction and fantasy. Why is your range that wide?

AT: Thus far, I have stayed very much within genre, and I like to stretch myself about that far. I don’t tend to write horror (although there are some sections of some of my books that go there, a Little), I have occasionally cast looks at neighbouring genres like historical or crime/thriller, but I’m not one to assume that shifting styles like that would be easy, and I know I’d need a proper period of acclimatisation before I tried it.

LL: Maybe it is not well-known that you are a frequent boardgame player. Do you think some of your stories could be taken as a basis for developing a game? Which kind of games are your favorites?

AT: I would absolutely love to see a board game (or any game) based on my work! I’m personally something of a Eurogame player a lot of the time, and I like games that generate an emergent story just from the way the rules and player choices interact.

LL: What can you tell us about your new projects?

AT: I have just sent my agent the manuscript for a book called “The Brain Garden” (although it could be called something quite different by the time it hits the shelves) which is a great big story about parallel timelines and evolution and a whole load of other stuff. There’s also a novella I’ve just finished which is partly about wizards and partly about mental health, which was interesting to try. I’m still searching around for a title for that one.