[00:00:00.17] – John Knych – Intro
Okay, here we go. So thank you, Adrian, for being here. For those of you that don’t know, because I’ll share this later with our reading group, Adrian was the first speaker for this science fiction book talk, and we talked about Children of Time last time. And one of the questions that we asked you, Adrian, was, how are you so prolific? And your response was, poor work-life balance.
[00:00:32.16] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Process
Yeah, that has not changed, honestly. I can expand that in a less…less spurious manner. Having spoken to a lot of other authors, and I get the prolific thing a lot, I I enjoy writing. There are a surprising number of authors for whom it is a bit tooth pulling still, and they enjoy having written, but not the writing itself. I genuinely love the writing process. I can’t think of anything else I would rather do with chunks of my day. I think that helps. But also, because I do so much world-based prep, and this is purely… I’m not necessarily saying this I’m not the universal panacea for this sort of thing, but this is purely what works for me. Everything I put into a book in that first draft, ideally, if I’ve done it properly, fits with everything else. So all of these ideas are coming from the same place. I don’t have a long, drawn out second or third or whatever draft where I’m having to retcon loads of stuff and change loads of stuff around and so forth. It all goes in so that my first draft and my submission draft are very, very very similar, usually barring a certain amount of cutting because I do overwrite.
[00:02:05.21] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Process
And that helps. So it’s not necessarily that I’m writing more per day, but I am keeping more of what I write.
[00:02:15.10] – John Knych – Worldbuilding
Yes. And those of you who just arrived, I’m bringing up the first conversation that Adrian had with us on Children of Time. You also mentioned, Adrian, that you love world building, that you could just world build and just do that. For you, the struggle is narrative after the world building. Was that the same with Shroud, in that you built this world, this alien, and then after the world building, you put the narrative in, or was it in tandem?
[00:02:48.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – worldbuilding
Sorry. First of all, could I just ask, Jen, would you be able to mute your mic because I’m getting feedback off you. Thank you. So I love world building. I’m also very reliant on it. Again, this is purely a me thing, but when I’m writing a book, I am almost always explicitly writing to show people the world I have thought up. In order to do that, you do need a plot and characters and things like that. But displaying the world and taking people through the world and showing all the clever things I put into it is very much my starting point. The characters and the plot generally arise quite organically out of the world I want to show. It is very much looking at, all right, what are the events that this world is brewing? Because obviously, one of the things about creating a world is a world is not a static thing. It is a thing that you’re starting off with a snapshot of that world as it progresses from one state to another, because that’s how everything works. Usually, you’ll want to focus in on a particular crisis point or something exciting happening because that is the best way of showing the interesting bits of the world.
[00:04:06.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Worldbuilding
And so that’s where your plot comes from, your character comes from. You just look at that point, so, right, who are the interesting people here? Who are the people who display these various different aspects of the setting? So a lot of writers will start with that plot, or they will start with a character they want to write about. Well, I will start with the world and the characters and the plot, hopefully, organically arise out of that world. It’s all working together. But with me, the world is very definitely the driving force for it all. The fascinating thing with this thing and listening to other writers talk about their very different processes is: At the end of all of these very different processes, you are converging on the same endpoint, which is a book, which has all of these things. To a certain extent, it doesn’t necessarily matter which you are focusing on, on which order you’re doing, because they should all kind of end up there, and you should end up with this seamless hole, which is the book.
[00:05:06.23] – John Knych – Alien Conception – Distributed Minds
I see. Thank you, Adrian. All right, for those of you who are new to this roundtable discussion, I just did a brief introduction, and then we’ll move on to the roundtable. This is my last question, then I’ll stop monopolizing this. But Adrian, my question actually is related to Noémie’s review. She posted a couple of days ago because she finished it before me and I watched the review. And my question is, the shrouded aliens are so compelling. We all agree. I mean, no one writes aliens better than you. And we talked a little bit about this in the last discussion with how you constructed the spider civilization. But especially on pages 180 to 185, that transition from the shrouded, like distant shard that then becomes part of the sea, the coastal version of it. It was just brilliant. And my question to you is, since Children of Time, of A. Kern, you’ve played with this scattered, Shard-like self, or scattered minds. Have you always just been obsessed with this idea? And then, just like with Mern and Children of Memory as well, where you explored fragmented consciousness, how purpose and self changes when it’s scattered. Did you always want to do this alien in this book, or did it grow from your previous explorations of this concept?
[00:06:48.05] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Hive Mind Conception
You’re right that I do keep going back to it, but I think the reason I do keep going back to it is not that it’s necessarily a thing that’s always fascinated me, but just because having touched on it the once, you realize it is a kind of perfect thought experiment you can replay in multiple different ways. Because people tend to think, Oh, hive mind. And then they have a very a fuzzy idea of what would that be like. But having looked at it in… I mean, I must have had a good half a dozen separate goes at it now. You have Kern, you have Bees in Dogs of War, arguably Alien Clay, although you never see from the perspective of the hive mind in that. I think it’s just if you want to do aliens and you want to alien modes of thought, it’s a very obvious thing that we as humans can conceive of, but we don’t do. It is remarkably fertile ground because there are so many takes you can have on it. I’ve got a few others kicking about in the back of my mind, really, as how one could do it. It’s fascinating because obviously, it’s also a very science-fictional thing because it’s not something we can really observe on Earth.
[00:08:10.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I mean, if you look at ants, ants have a a pheromonal communication and they have this what appears to be an aggregate decision-making process between individuals. That’s certainly the closest we come in the animal kingdom. There is also some argument to say that there are interesting things going on when plants and fungai and things like that to do with linking of organisms into a larger network. But it’s that sweet spot. It’s something that we don’t have, but we can really explore the idea space from where we are. It doesn’t go into that just completely inconceivable alien territory.
[00:08:55.19] – John Knych
Yes. Thank you. It was riveting. It never feels. It feels authentic.
[00:09:01.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Hive Mind Conception
I suppose, yeah. The other thing is just purely speaking as disgruntled student of biology, the common concept of hive mind and say, social insect and things like that is the idea, well, you have a king or queen type creature, and then all of the other are just drones that are doing what they told, which is not how ants or bees or anything of that work. It’s this enormous misunderstanding something that is very much based on because that’s how we organize our societies with people at the top, kings and things, telling people what to do. That’s how we assume it must work, but more so in insects. It’s completely different. They’re actually almost a fundamental democracy of ideas because all of the individual units are contributing to the decision process. I quite like to write high mind scenarios that challenge that kind of top-down dictatorial picture that science fiction often portrays.
[00:10:05.11] – John Knych
Thank you. Brandon, we’ll move on to you for the roundtable, and then we’ll just go, Brandon, Noémie, Brian, Jen, and John, and Chris.
[00:10:15.12] – Brandon – Writing Humans vs. Aliens
Yeah, Adrian, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your day. So I did read Shroud. I really enjoyed it. You have characters that are both human and alien. So do you find it more difficult to write from the alien perspective or the human perspective?
Adrian Tchaikovsky:
It varies from book to book. I am generally quite comfortable writing from an alien perspective. In Shroud, it’s a particular challenge because the alien, it doesn’t have… I’ll say it doesn’t have a single perspective, and I don’t mean in that that there are multiples of them. It means that what it is to write the alien varies depending on how many aliens you have in the room, basically. That was actually quite a challenge because that’s not a natural way to write. The fact that you always have to have this intellectual grasp of, what level of reasoning are they working at? Obviously, it goes from very, very basic instinctual all the way up to a super genius broad global picture. That was the big challenge, or one of the big challenges with this book was getting the alien voice. But I went in with open eyes.
[00:11:38.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
It was definitely something I knew I wanted to do. One of the early scenes I conceived of was that bit where you just end up down with one of them, and it’s just got that stream of single-syllable words, which is all it’s capable of thinking on its own. I knew I wanted to head towards that point as a revelation moment in the book. In In broader terms, usually once I’ve got a handle on what it is like to be, the thing I’m writing from, which is just that interface point between the thing and its world based on its senses and its priorities and its evolutionary path and all that thing. Once I’ve got that, I’m generally fairly comfortable in that. And honestly, sometimes human characters are harder. Thank you.
[00:12:28.18] – Noémie – Other Alien Drafts?
Sure. First of all, thank you for taking the time to put this together, John. And thank you, Adrian, for being there. I’m a huge fan. And just you being here is a lot to take in, I have to say. Thank you. I love Shroud, and I think I have all of your books to say. I think I missed two that I can’t find in France. I can’t find them to get to me. What I want to ask is, obviously, John said that you have a big thing for Hive Minds, five months. I’m using the term a bit lousily, but have you had any other ideas for alien minds that you couldn’t really put into words or you couldn’t really integrate into a story before? Is there some alien draft somewhere that you can’t really pinpoint now?
[00:13:16.03] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I think there are probably some stories on the back burner, which I’m still working on how to bring it over, but I’ve not had anything where I’ve actually started on something and not known what to do with it. Usually, again, because of my process, because of the amount of world prep, I’ll work out pretty quickly if I can’t do a thing that I need to be able to do. So I’ve had a few. The big bug bear, usually, is because I’m generally involved within human characters, it is a communication thing. It’s just like, All right, well, I do need these things to be able to communicate. And I’ve written several entire books that are based around, Right, how are these things going to communicate? But if you don’t want to base the book around that, then you’ve I’ve got a bit of a logistical problem if you just want the human and the alien to just start having a conversation, because if you’re doing hard sci-fi, that’s not actually something that’s ever going to happen. Or at least you probably have to string together a pretty unlikely series of events before that can really be the case.
[00:14:20.13] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I have had at least one entire book basically collapse because I realized there was no reason why the things I needed to be able to talk to one the other could actually do so, and I couldn’t work out a way around it.
[00:14:32.24] – john Knych
All right. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Noémie. Before we move to Brian, speaking of… I got to interrupt real quick. But, Adrian, in the first talk, This was in June 28, 2023. Do you remember if you were working on Shroud? Because when we asked you, all you said was radio. I’m trying to
Adrian Tchaikovsky:
If I said radio, then I must have had the idea by then, because certainly this is the…
Sorry. Can I just give a second? Someone’s hoovering. Hi there. Sorry, I’m on a call at the moment. Can we ask you to get to another room? Thank you. Sorry about that. Noémie, can I ask, what are the books you can’t get in France, if I could ask?
[00:15:29.21] – Noémie
Well, to put away childish things, cannot find them in English, at least. In French, they don’t exist, but cannot find them in English. And the other one, I think it’s your very first fantasy book.
[00:15:43.24] – Noémie
The name is out of my mind right now, but- Empire in Black and Gold? Exactly.
[00:15:49.09] – Noémie
This one, impossible to find it anywhere.
[00:15:52.22] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Okay. Well, look, when I’m done, I’ll have a look through my backstocks and see if I’ve got any spare copies. Oh, well, thank you so much. If John can get me an address, I’ll post them off.
[00:16:04.08] – Noémie
Thank you so much.
[00:16:09.10] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Okay, sorry. Next.
[00:16:10.11] – Brian
Let’s see. Volume is working, yeah?
[00:16:19.02] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Just about. You’re a bit robot-y, but okay.
[00:16:22.10] – Brian – Long Time Spans
Okay, sorry. I might be on a bad connection here. Yeah, thank you very much for doing this. I was not able to get a copy of Shroud. I’m actually in Taiwan, they’re a little bit slow on the imports, I think. So my question is, I guess, more geared towards the Children of Time, if that’s okay, and maybe some more general writing process. So I was wondering, in Children of Time, obviously, you span a very large historical period. You’re going across so much time, so many years. Do you find it easier to work with large spans of time and space as you did in that work? Or do you more enjoy to work in a more confined, constrained? Which one of those do you enjoy more? Which one do you found easier?
[00:17:14.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Long Time Spans
I mean, honestly, it was logistically, it was a colossal pain in the neck having to work at those time periods. The whole inclusion of the nanovirus as a plot device started off purely as a way of shrinking time period I would need to tell the book in. Because otherwise, if you’re looking at evolution, you’re looking at hundreds of millions of years rather than just the thousands of years the book takes place over. I will certainly do. In fact, I’m currently working on the idea of a book where, again, the journey through very long periods of time is an inherent part of the plot, more so, honestly, than in Children of Time. Because I’m going into that with as the key part of the idea rather than a problem to be overcome, that’s going to be much easier to work with. This is a weird thing that happens in a lot of books. There are an awful lot of books where if you look back on the actual amount of time experienced by the characters over the course of the book, you realize the whole thing took place in like a day and a half. They did so much, and they went all of these It’s just like, actually, almost no time has passed for them.
[00:18:32.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
It is very difficult to write long-term things. I don’t mean necessarily thousands of years. I mean just like having a series of events that takes place over two or three years, as often in the real world often happens, is narratively very difficult to do because you feel, Well, I need my character to be doing stuff all the time. It’s very difficult to basically say, Yes, dear reader, and then basically they just sat on their hands for three months because they didn’t know what to do or because they didn’t realize they were pressing concerns or anything like that. So managing time in books is generally a very difficult thing. Obviously, because it was such a central thing for children of time, it meant I had to structure the entire book around it. And so it became easier once I had that loop. Good Lord, sorry. I will just give me a second. I don’t know who that is. You’ll just deliver the phone until they bring off. So once I had that loop of the humans going in and out of suspension and discovering the ship deteriorating whilst the spiders were going from societal state to societal state.
[00:19:47.04] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
That worked out fairly nicely, but it took a lot of logistical messing around. Hello, sorry, I can’t speak right now. Could you call that later? I mean, originally, I was trying to do the human part of children’s time with them traveling very close to light speed and just doing it with relativity. But which would actually not have worked out as good a book because the waking and sleeping and finding everything changed each time that Holston wakes up turned out to be a major point of how the human side of the work worked. But the reason I didn’t do that was actually, logistically, there’s no way that society could have had the technology to get up to the near light speeds you would need to make any significant difference in time frame. Well, certainly the level of significant difference. You’ve got to get so close to the speed of light to get a really big relativity difference going on.
[00:20:56.13] – John Knych
Thank you, Brian. Jen, you’re on to you.
[00:21:03.08] – Jenn
Sure. Hi. Thanks for talking with us again. Shroud was fantastic.
[00:21:08.20] – jenn – Get in the minds of Aliens
I really enjoy how you really get into the minds of I want to say alien, but I don’t necessarily mean extraterrestrial. Just alien isn’t completely different than our own. And how do you go about creating these personalities and just how do you get into the minds of something so different when you’re doing the point of view chapters from the other beings?
[00:21:41.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
A very big part of it is the sensorium. As soon as you have a creature that is experiencing the world in a different way to human, it’s that what does it like to be a bat question. Once you work on that and work out how you are going to How are you going to bring that over and how that creature is experiencing the world, it instantly gives you something that’s very alien because different senses is a different description of the world from that creature’s point of view. But it’s also a different set of priorities, it’s a different set of capabilities and abilities. It instantly puts you well outside that standard human viewpoint, even if you’re writing for something as similar to us as the dog, for example, because a dog’s sense are very different to human centers. Beyond with that, it’s a matter of looking at the priorities of what the creature is or what priorities it might have and how those might drive it. Whether they are artificial priorities like Rex’s relationship with his master in Dogs of War, or whether they are evolutionary or societal priorities like the spiders and children of time or the shrouded, again, once you’re working in that non-human setup, or rather just that non-us setup, as long as you’re committing to it, really.
[00:23:16.09] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
As long as you’re committing to the bit, you’re sitting behind the eyes or whatever sense organs the thing has got of that thing and just playing that character, really. I mean, possibly this is something I’m getting from my role-playing background, which is honestly a bit of a gift that keeps on giving as far as writing goes. But the idea is you need to commit to that character. You don’t go beyond what it would understand. You don’t admit to the limits that a human character would admit to. Because frequently I’m working with creatures that are better than human at various things rather than that traditional alien that is less good at most things than people, which is a standpoint of action, sci-fi from the ’80s and ’70s and ’80s, I guess. I mean, beyond that, it appears to be something that comes relatively naturally to me as a writer, which is obviously why I’m making a living out of it. But I think it’s coming from that character-playing standpoint and that just the logical thought experiment of what it is like to be a… I know the whole point of the bat, the philosophical idea with what it’s like to be a bat is that we can’t know.
[00:24:34.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
But my pushback on that is we can actually… That’s what imagination is for. Obviously, yes, we can never know, but we can still make a logically sound working hypothesis as to what it is like to be a bat or a spider or whatever, anything else.
[00:24:57.03] – John – Bees Development
Thank you. Thanks again for taking the time to talk with us today. I’m in the same situation as Brian, unfortunately, where I wasn’t able to get Shroud, also in Taiwan, like Brian. But I’ve been reading the bioform books. I had more or less the same question that Jen just asked you, but I was wondering maybe if you could talk a little more about how you developed the character of bees, because I found that character really fascinating how it’s a distributed intelligence, but it It still has a very distinct personality, sending memes of the dead birds. That’s this really interesting way of communicating.
[00:25:39.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Yeah. Obviously, I knew I wanted bees in the squad for Dogs of War at the start. That book develops quite organically. There were definitely chunks of that book that I didn’t plan. Then obviously, I wasn’t thinking of it as having a sequel. So all the stuff in Bear Head was completely unforeseen at the time. So the way bees develops over those two books, and of course, in the third one, which is coming out next month, which is Bee Speaker, which is a lot of bees, goes into this in much more detail than I can really now. And certainly you get there, you see a lot of how bees constructs itself, constructs themselves in different instances. Bees, I think certainly in Dogs of War itself, bees is one of those characters that developed while I wasn’t looking, in a sense. I didn’t necessarily think that bees would be as major a role in the series. I didn’t realize it was going to be a series when I was writing the first book. But bees just turned out to be a character with this enormous potential that I hadn’t particularly foreseen. I just ran with whatever my imagination suggested Bs would become.
[00:27:11.17] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Appropriately enough for a character that is really a constant renegotiation of what they are and what they’re doing at any given time. They are a character that I’m really not particularly in control of as to what they’re going to be. But yes, for The major answer to that question is honestly B-Speaker and the various events that take place in that because that has a lot of Bs material.
[00:27:41.07] – John and John (i.e. Hive Mind John)
Fair enough. I’m really looking forward to B-Speaker. Thank you. Thank you, John. We can move on to Chris. Chris, are you there? Do you have a question you’d like to ask? Chris might not be here. Oh, no questions. Okay, that’s fine. I should have said earlier that if you don’t have questions, you can just… That’s fine. Adrian, another element of Shroud, which I really enjoyed, was the bleak corporate environment of the ship. And especially, I don’t want to give away the end for people that don’t know, but the ending was very much the corporate structure, really…It’s bleak. And my question is, for those of you that don’t know, Adrian started writing when he was 17 and 18 and then spent, I think, 10 years submitting a book a year before being published? And during that time-
Adrian Tchaikovsky:
Honestly, 15.
John Knych – Galactic Corporate Element:
And during that time, you were working in the legal profession, correct? My question is, did you experience…you’ve experienced a lot of corporate bullshit and hierarchy in your work career that then you’ve been able to… Because it feels very, very real from someone who’s worked in a corporate setting. You really understand the roles really well.
[00:29:18.07] – John Knych
So do you pull from your past for that?
[00:29:21.02] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Galactic Corporate ELement:
Honestly, not particularly. I’ve only ever worked in relatively small firms and also at a fairly low level. I’ve always been quite junior in law when I was in it. I didn’t really get involved in that high-flying, high-pressure corporate law stuff. But I don’t… I mean, honestly, right now, and certainly in the last 20 years, you don’t need to be in the profession for that. It is a mindset and an attitude that is being aggressively exported from certain quarters globally. The idea that you’re only as good as what you’re worth and there’s no such thing as a free lunch and your only really real role is to basically work until you die. I mean, the media outlets that wish to popularize the idea of quiet quitting for people who are doing what they are contracted to do is absolutely sociopathic. It’s not a matter of that being a particular section of high-flying, high-value work life. It’s a matter of that just being the air that we breathe in the water we swim in at the moment.
[00:30:47.24] – John Knych
Thank you. On to Brandon.
[00:30:52.22] – Brandon – Evolutionary History outside of the Novel?
In Shroud, you created this alien ecosystem, and then you have in the interludes an evolutionary history. So how much world building did you do that we don’t see in the novel? Is there a whole… Is there so much more than we just get a narrow view? And also, do you put any reels like scientific research in?
[00:31:18.02] – Brandon
How much science goes into this?
[00:31:21.21] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Science Idea origin
Oh, good. Well, so the basic idea of Shroud was very little more than a few paragraphs on my notes until I ran into… I cannot immediately think of his name [William Bains], but he’s the first person who’s in the acknowledgments in the book. He was doing a talk at a convention I was at about basically non-standard biology on potential exoplanets. It was amazing. It just really opened my eyes. Now, that’s the missing ingredient for the idea. It needs to be on this very weird planet where I can start playing with this very… Because But pretty much everything I’ve worked with up to that point has been Earth-adjacent, whether it is an alien world that just happens to have a compatible biochemistry, as in it’s got an… Like Nod, it’s got an oxygen atmosphere it’s got a comparable gravity, all of that thing, or whether it’s an actively terraformed world. It’s all been the place you can literally take off your space helmet and walk around on, possibly, and then die of horrible plagues. But still. So I thought, right, it’s about time I did a proper, very non-Earth-like alien world. I was able to get together with this chap, and we had quite a long talk at the next year’s convention, and we just hammered out.
[00:32:41.11] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I said, Right, I need the world to be able to do… I need life to be able to do this, this, and this. What can we do with it? We just worked out this very, very complex, very intricate way. You’ve got it on a moon, and the moon and the moon is tidally locked. It’s working this way with the gas giant. Then I wrote up several pages of just this and basically what was the biochemistry and what molecules are involved and what are the energy pathways and all of that thing. I sent it to him and he said, Well, this doesn’t work and that doesn’t work and so forth. This is probably the most scientific relatively complicated thing I’ve ever written. But when I’m doing hard science fiction, I want to be able to do hard science fiction. I want to be able to do something that is not breaking physical laws. In general, there’s this idea of the one big lie, which I do expulse in that you can frequently have one thing that you are using as just a narrative convenience that is complete nonsense. Then everything else should work solidly. In Children of Time, the nanovirus is the one big lie.
[00:33:49.21] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – PLausibility of SCIFI
It is entirely a convenient plot device, but then became an absolute cornerstone of the plot because I realized how it could give me the understandings, which is something I needed. But the absolutely crucial thing about Children of Time is that the spiders are not the big lie. The spiders are everything that the spiders do is, or should be, scientifically plausible, because that’s actually where the book gets its impact from. It’s the idea these are not magic fairy tale spiders, they’re actually a thing that has plausibly evolved, even if that evolution has been accelerated, which is really the only thing that the nano virus is doing. But in Shroud, everything there has a scientific background, and there are almost certainly bits and bits all over the book which don’t really work the way I think they do, which is entirely me hitting the limits of my own scientific understanding. But I worked really. It’s going to be very, very hard to make it all as solid as possible, because I think that’s where a lot of that science fiction gets its impact from, is the idea, well, actually, this is a thing that could potentially happen.
[00:34:57.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
It’s not magic, it’s not psychic powers. This is actually entirely based on how we understand the universe to work. Did you build way more of the world that we don’t see in the book? Or is it just- There’s a fair amount. The evolution chapters mean I can showcase a lot of stuff that you’re not getting actively to see, and that is pretty much the entire reason those chapters are in there is so I can show off. Certainly, there are ecosystems systems I thought up that I couldn’t work out why they would need to go through. There’s all sorts of interesting stuff. I mean, one of the big problems with Shroud, of course, is from the human point of view, you do not get to see much of Shroud because it is very dark. Therefore, in all of those scenes where all you’re seeing are whatever the lamplight touches, I do know what is out there. I know the wider picture of what is around them. But I mean, weirdly, I think it’s a pretty good rule of thumb as a writer. If there is a thing you know a lot about, whether it is the thing that you made up or whether it is the thing that you have researched, the skill is in tearing it down to the minimum possible amount of information your reader actually needs, because otherwise things will start to drag.
[00:36:17.10] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I mean, this is one thing I do. There’s also always stuff that I write that gets taken out by my editors because I do overwrite and I get far too carried away with world building detail that the book doesn’t really we need. And obviously at that point it becomes a catalog and it becomes quite dry and slow. And so there are definitely chunks that end up on the cutting room floor. I didn’t think Shra dragged it all. So he did a good job. And as did my editors in that case. Thank you.
[00:36:51.14] – Noémie – Influences
I hope you know that you are a big inspiration for aspiring writers right now. I hope you know that. But what are your inspirations? If you have any, maybe just you have a fantastic brain and everything sprouts out super easily. But do you have any inspirations that maybe you go back to sometimes to regenerate or find new ideas, maybe if you do that?
[00:37:17.06] – Adrian Tchaikovsky – Influences
Yeah. There are always writers who do things that to date I’ve not been able to do in their prose. I have a little list of I would like to write a book like this at some point. Frequently, it’s the case, I want to write a book that will give a particular emotional response that I have felt as a reader, that I know I haven’t really been able to produce yet as a writer. Those are the goals. I would like to write a book, for example, that has the deep sense of the numinus that Mythago Wood or Piranesi has, for example. Those are amazing books. They do something, and it’s one of those I cannot quite see how they do it. I go back to them and I reread them and I try and work out, what is it that is conjuring this effect? I would like to write a book that has the very complex deep layering that Gene Wolfe often gives to his books, for example. Again, it’s not something I’ve got particularly close to, but each time I try and use an element of that, I’m adding to my toolbox, I’m broadening the thing that I’m That I can do.
[00:38:32.17] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Yes, there are always… And there are other writers, there are writers whose style I really like, like Peter Beagle, for example. I mean, a recent current writer, if you don’t know her, she is amazing, is Anna Smith Spark. Yes, these are writers who write in ways that I absolutely don’t. And that’s why I value their writing, because it’s so, so beautiful. And hopefully, the more of that thing I read, the better my own style is going to become through osmosis.
[00:39:02.24] – Brian – Double Hugo Nomination
Thank you so much. You can hear me. I believe, was it Brian or Brian was after? Let’s see. So this one’s not a specific book-related question, but speaking of how I build on that view being an inspiration for a lot of authors and doing a lot of pretty cool stuff the last few years. How does it feel to be a double feature on the Hugo’s this year?
[00:39:35.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Oh, that’s all a bit mad. I think I am absolutely riding a a hometown advantage wave of voting for the shortlist because, of course, everyone who was at Glasgow got to vote, and so there’s a lot of UK voting in there. But yes, that is lovely. It is absolutely amazing. I’ve never been on the novel list before. To hit there with two books is just frankly insane, to be honest. I don’t think I’ll get it. I’ll say flat out. But getting on a Hugo shortlist, assuming it’s a Hugo shortlist that’s has it been properly put together, is always an enormous privilege. Getting on any award shortlist is, to be honest. But yes, knowing that I am on the radar to that degree with the Worldcon crowd, really, which also means with the US crowd, because it’s been relatively recently that I’ve had any footprint in the US as a writer. So the fact that I’ve got that far that quickly is incredible.
[00:40:50.09] – Jenn
Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Back to Jenn. Thanks. I wanted to ask about Juna as a character. I thought it was interesting that she was a great point of view character, and that she wasn’t like the typical hero.
[00:41:10.07] – Jenn
She wasn’t the captain, the scientist, the engineer.
[00:41:13.06] – Jenn
She was the admin essentially. What made you choose her? Did that just come about as the story was coming?
[00:41:19.18] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
It came about very quickly at the beginning of the book when I was considering, literally, who do I want as my point of view? Because I think I identified quite quickly that it wanted to be a first-person story. I think I just wanted to specifically steer things away from your traditional high hyper competent science fiction protagonist. If you go back to the golden age of sci-fi, every protagonist is this hyper competent, usually engineer. Scientist or engineer, but engineer is most common. So Mai St. Étienne is that character. When you have her and Juna at the beginning in the pod, it’s very obvious, which of these two characters is going to be doing any of the useful stuff. It’s obviously going to be Mai, and Juna is dead weight. Except that one of the things that science fiction doesn’t tend to look at per se, and one of the things that I think we massively undervalue culturally is that social work that is Juna’s speciality. She is the grease between the parts of the machine that keep everything running. She is the person, she is the flex, basically, in their social system.
[00:42:49.12] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
You can see that’s obviously not a role that the concerns are explicitly requiring when they’re setting their teams, but you can absolutely see that the reason Special Projects works at all as a team is because Juna is there to absorb all of the the shocks that everyone else, all of these other rigid characters are creating. What it turns out is when you’ve got that dynamic with the two of them in the pod is actually, yes, they get places because Mai is an incredibly good engineer. But the only reason Mai can function is she has Juna who is able to basically keep her sane and keep her going. It’s a side of things that certainly I don’t think I’ve particularly looked at before and that science fiction doesn’t particularly look at. I thought that’s going to be just a different perspective and a different skill set for a character to have. And I mean, honestly, I am generally, I’m always after trying to do something I’ve not done before.
[00:43:57.23] – John Knych
Thank you, Jen. Moving back to John.
[00:44:06.08] – John
I love process because a few people have already mentioned how vivid your characters are.
[00:44:12.10] – John
I was wondering, when you have inspiration for a story, that you then decide to develop into a full novel? Do you tend to start by developing the characters first or by the plot first, or does it depend on what the story is?
[00:44:26.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Although this is what we’re talking about at the beginning. What I start with is a world. The world is always the focus of the story I write, and I will work out the details of the world, depending on where it is on the the continuum, it’s magic or it’s technology, it’s factions, it’s politics, it’s axioms, really. From that, the characters and the plot will arise. Well, as I said before, this is explicitly, this is a me thing. Most writers are not working this way. In fact, every writer has a different way of going about things. There is absolutely no right and wrong way of doing things. But for me, the world always comes first, and the world is always the thing I am writing about. But in order to present it as a novel, you have to write about the world through the lens of character and the plot. Otherwise, I would just be writing imaginary travelogs and encyclopedias and outlets and things.
[00:45:33.15] – John Knych
Thank you, John. Chris, we’ll move past you unless you have a question. Adrian, this is a very narrow question, but there’s a quote I love on page 330, which was, “Inside you is a multitude, all the different selves you might ever have been, many of which you kept locked in the oubliette of your mind because they weren’t fit for public consumption.” My question to you is, do you think that an individual, like humans have, is actually a rare, an extremely rare case of evolution? Meaning, if you could speculate on all the different forms of life in the universe, this individual construct that we use, from your speculative opinion, do you think it’s rare in that there would be more life in the universe, like the Shrouded That’s collective, hive-mind-esque rather than individual?
[00:46:34.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
So I mean, complex answer. Obviously, first off, it’s incredibly hard to speculate on the real universe because our data set I know how evolution works is literally one. So until we encounter a second point in that data set, we really can’t know. My gut feeling is that individual dualistic organisms are probably going to be more common and may well be a stage you move through because in general, once you have evolution giving you life, life tends towards greater complexity, and a composite creature like the Shrouded is essentially more complicated than individual entities. You I had another point, and I now can’t think what it was. I’ll let you know if it returns to me.
[00:47:36.09] – John Knych
Because it just seemed the Shrouded were just so… It just felt like it made more sense that they would exist than humans would. That’s when I was reading it.
[00:47:46.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
That speaks highly of my ability to bring them over, I guess. The shrouded are a special case because of the evolution of radio waves that give them a continuous functioning brain across individuals. I mean, interestingly, one of the things I’m bouncing off here is, do people know Wernhering’s Deepness in the Sky? No, sorry, a fire upon the Deep, the first one. In there, it works out quite differently, but you also have a composite minded creature. In that case, it works in small clusters. If you get too many, the noise outweighs the and they go mad. But he’s got them doing it as sound. I love that book, and it is an incredibly good book for bringing the logical solutions of, right, your aliens are like this, what is their Society, what do they think and believe? And all that thing. It’s an incredibly good book, but the basic mechanic of it, scientifically, doesn’t really hold water because you cannot work with sound quickly enough to maintain the consciousness. So I just reading that, eventually I thought, But if you were doing it with electromagnetic waves, then they are going as quickly as the neural impulses go in our brains, which sound does not.
[00:49:16.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And then that was what set me on that path. But yeah, I think when I’m dealing with this distributed intelligence in whatever way, it’s either because it’s been artificially created or it’s because there are some particular conditions in the environment that favor it, really. I genuinely think that it’s probably not something you’d encounter necessarily in the real universe without those conditions or without a very long and complex evolutionary history without, say, the interruption of mass extinctions and things like that, where you just got to build complexity on complexity, which is absolutely an idea that I’m getting from… There’s a web cartoon that’s called Dresdon Kodak, which is amazing stuff. But one of the things he has, just like a brief sideline comic at one point where it’s an old history where the permian extinction didn’t happen. So the life you’ve got around at our equivalent time is vastly more complicated in the way it interrelates to each other because you didn’t get that setback where you lost 90% of biodiversity, which I thought was just such a fascinating idea.
[00:50:51.02] – John Knych
Yes. Thank you, Adrian. Now, Brandon, back to you.
[00:50:56.16] – Brandon
Okay. I will say, if you wanted to write an encyclopedia about an imaginary world, I’d read it. But aside from that, so I don’t want to spoil the ending of Shroud, but let’s just say there are more opportunities for conflict between the Shrouders and humanity. Will we ever see a sequel of Shroud?
Adrian Tchaikovsky:
I was just asked this on Blue Sky earlier today. I am not planning a sequel. I don’t ever close the door on sequels. It very much depends on if I get a good enough idea. One of the problems, though, Shroud‘s ending is relatively open as to what happens next. I could probably quite easily write three novellas with three completely different what happens next going on. I don’t think any of them would be that interesting. I think given the novelty of the scenario is explored in that first book, I’m not sure what a second book would do or how it would justify its existence. So essentially it needs another idea to come in and then play well with the concept of the shrouded and how they work.
[00:52:13.12] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And at that point, that might be where a sequel takes place, but that other idea hasn’t turned up yet. Thank you.
[00:52:24.18] – Noémie – Hyper-Capitalism To Go To Space?
In the last few books that you wrote, I couldn’t help but notice as an economic worker that a lot of the world that you write are about capitalistic hyper economics healthscapes, basically, that are not very nice, almost this dictatorship and ideas. Do you think it is genuinely the optimal political and economic environment to go to space? Do you think it is optimal in stories that it is based on reality, essentially, that it is the good way, the good way, quote, unquote, to go and go?
[00:53:03.09] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I hope the way the concerns turn out shows I do not think that it is the optimal way to go to space. I think it’s a terrible way of going to space. I think that letting some tech pro-billionaire build a company town on Mars where you’re dependent on your employer for your oxygen is a dreadful situation. I think it’s going to happen, but I don’t think it’s a good way of happening. I think there are certainly much, much better ways of doing it. It’s just at the moment, I am writing to a certain extent cautionary tales about what we’ve got going on on Earth at the moment. I call it as I see it to a certain extent.
[00:53:46.16] – John Knych
Makes sense. Thank you. Back to Brian. I actually don’t have any more questions at the moment. And we’ll go to Jen. I don’t either. I’ll pass it along. Adrian, the…
[00:54:13.15] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I don’t know if John had another one.
[00:54:15.06] – John Hive Mind
Oh, yes. I was going to say the same. I’m drawing a blank at the moment. Okay. Our identities are merging right now. It’s back to me? Okay. Adrian, I told you this in the first talk, but your novella, Elder Race, was the door for me to your work, and I’ve been steadily moving through your books. My question is, do you ever plan to link some of the universes and worlds? Is that in the back of your mind where what happened on the planet in Elder Race has a connection to Shroud or another book?
[00:54:57.05] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
No. We were meant…I was talking earlier about the world-building stuff that you don’t get to see in the book. There’s a question for Chris after this, just in the chat. There is almost always stuff in the nuts and bolts of how the setup came to be, which precludes any two books sharing a timeline or a universe. There are arguably The Elder Race and the Expert System’s Brother or the Expert System’s Books could actually happen in the same universe, but there is zero benefit to either of them in that being the case. If I was to do that and put in an Easter egg like that, it would purely be grandstanding. Much as happens in films when people do that, all it does is really detract from both. Having said that, I absolutely did that in my current fantasy series. There is a fairly deeply buried Easter egg in that where you can hypothesize that there is a connection between Days of Shattered Faith and the Shadows of the Apt books, but it is purely there to amuse me, and you don’t need it for anything. But I’ve got to say, I know the whole multiverse thing is terribly fashionable.
[00:56:18.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I really feel… I mean, there’s that line from Fellowship of the Ring, the film, is like butter spread over too much bread. I think that’s what happens. You just dilute when you start making all of these things share a larger universe. You lose the interesting bits of all of them in an effort to make them all fit together, and you don’t gain anything. Honestly, if I get to the point of deciding, yes, all of my books are obviously in the same universe, and this is why, then I should probably have my word processor taken away from me at that point. Excellent.
[00:57:01.00] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
What was the question? Chris had a question about whether Blindsight by Peter Watts inspired- Oh.
[00:57:07.04] – Speaker 1
I mean, so Blindsight was one of the two books, along with A Demandess in the Sky by Vinge, that people were talking about when they read Children of Time. And I hadn’t read either of them then, but I went off and read them very quickly thereafter. I suspect probably, yes, purely because that’s such a phenomenally transformational book. So it’s one of those once you’ve read it, I think it would be very hard to say when you’re working in the area of weird alien stuff that you’re not being influenced by Blindsight because it’s such an amazing book.
[00:57:46.00] – John Knych
Thank you. All right, I have one more question, but I’ll let anyone else ask their final question before Adrian goes. Anyone have a final question?
[00:57:59.06] – Brandon
Sure. I’ll ask one. I’ll make it quick here. So do you prefer writing fantasy or sci-fi?
Adrian Tchaikovsky
What I really like is the fact that I can currently commercially do both. There’s a very particular joy to writing a well-constructed science fiction book that fits with how we know things work, and it’s still doing interesting different stuff. But at the same time, writing a full on secondary world fantasy, you You have such an unlimited reign for creating, and you’re only bound by your own decisions, and that is also an enormous joy. They both give different kinds of rewards, I think.
[00:58:50.14] – Noémie
Noémie, Ken, John, Brian, Chris. I have one very quick question. If you had one advice, one sentence to authors that are maybe among us, I know I am one, what would it be?
[00:59:03.00] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
It would be that there is no one advice. It would be that if you’re able to take constructive criticism, then that’s got to be a bonus. It was not a thing I was able to do when I was coming up through the ranks, trying to get published. I was very, very defensive of everything I wrote. If I had been able to step back from things a bit more, and and get other people’s perspectives on stuff, I might well have shaved some of those 15 years off.
[00:59:36.13] – John Knych
Very good advice. Thank you. Thank you, Noémie. Then, Adrian, one last final question. Spoiler alert, so if you haven’t read it, turn your sound off. At the end of Shroud, as the power of the Shroud increases, you do this very subtle thing that I’m asking if it was conscious or not, which is in the human chapters, there was a subtle melting of human cells. On page 337, it turned out I, too, was slow to process signals and reply. On page, before, 30 pages later, they’re screaming, merged together. Was that conscious of you to have the human’s identities start to mix in a way?
[01:00:27.01] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I would love to say yes, but no, I think that that’s probably my subconscious working at that point, but especially towards the end of the book. I’m very reliant on my subconscious steering me as to precisely how it should go. You get to that point and you make these little thematic connections between things you wrote, but they’re certainly very spur-of-the-moment decisions with that thing.
[01:00:51.23] – John Knych
Okay. Because I thought it was just well done.
[01:00:55.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
The next person will ask me that. I’m going to say yes.
[01:01:00.08] – John Knych
All right. Well, thank you very much, Adrian. This has been a pleasure. It feels like it’s come full circle because you were our first speaker, and now we have a recorded wonderful interview of you and talking about Shroud. Thank you, everyone, for coming today. Great questions. Enjoyed it.
[01:01:17.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Thank you very much for inviting me.
[01:01:19.07] – John Knych
Yes. Bye-bye. Thank you. Have a good day.
[01:01:22.11] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Thank you. I’ll look at those books.
[01:01:26.05] – Noémie
Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. See you. Thank you. I’ll share with you. I’ll do an AI transcript of this and share it with you all. And Noémie, for Adrian to send you books, I can maybe email address. Sure. All right. Have a good day. Bye-bye.