[00:00:03.03] – John Knych
Hello everyone, thank you for being here today. We are with Adrian Tchaikovsky to discuss Children of Strife, the fourth book in the Children of Time series. And Adrian, it’s super special that you are, you are here because you were our first speaker two years ago, and you talked with us last year about Shroud. So thank you for being here again. We love your writing, we love your books, and the first question I would like to ask you is about the origin of this book, the ideas, but more specifically, how much of the ideas for this book came while writing books 1 through 3, and how much came after you finished with Children of Memory? Because there was a little reference, I think, in Children of Time to the creatures in this book in the ocean. So I’m curious to know how much was germinating before and how much came after you finished the third book.
[00:00:55.09] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Yeah, so the vast majority came after. I mean, in this series in particular, the books are relatively standalone and they’re just building on what has gone before. But you’re absolutely right to say the stomatopods, the mantis shrimps, got a mention early on. And I’ve been sort of trying to work out how to fit them in. And at one point I think there was probably going to be a mantis shrimp character in one of the previous books, but I couldn’t find any real point for them to be there. And, you know, obviously if you’re introducing a whole extra species, you have to devote quite a lot of the book to explaining what they’re about. And so, yeah, they’ve just sort of been languishing on the sidelines until we came to this book where, A, I thought, well, if I’m going to do another one, I should just make that their book. And then, as often happens with my books, that’s half a book sort of sitting around, and then the other half with what the humans are doing and what, you know, Hartmann is doing on his sort of illicit terraforming spree is the other half.
[00:01:56.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And because of the, the, because of the book’s themes, um, those two halves then thankfully complement each other quite nicely.
[00:02:08.09] – John Knych
Thank you. On to Brandon for the next question.
[00:02:12.24] – Brandon
Yeah, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate that. So You mentioned the mantis shrimp. My question is, how do you come up with new species to uplift? And the mantis shrimp was the newest one. So why the mantis shrimp? And how do you go about choosing which new species to add for every book?
[00:02:37.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
So what I’m looking for in a species is something that is going to benefit from being made smart, which might sound a bit odd, but intelligence isn’t necessarily a benefit. It’s very resource intensive to make something intelligent. And, you know, if you just need sort of quick twitch reflexes to survive, then being, you know, spending an extra 5 seconds thinking about the philosophy behind that is not going to help you escape being eaten. And so, but there are certainly circumstances in which the smarter you are, the better you’re going to do. And one of the things we see with most of the creatures I’m dealing with is they’re kind of in the middle of the food chain. So they need a full suite of skills to predate on things and also a full suite of skills to avoid predation. And with the, with the Portia spiders, it’s actually frequently the same thing ’cause they’re often preying on things that will kill them very easily. There’s also a social aspect which didn’t come up with the octopuses or the porcids particularly because they’re not naturally social species. But mantis shrimp, whilst kind of solitary, they live in very closely packed environments and they’re very, very capable of killing conspecifics.
[00:03:55.17] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
So you have something there where the better they are at handling their own species on a social level, the better, the more successful they’re going to be, which is an enormous driver of intelligence. And so, I mean, one of the things you see in Children of Time is the nanovirus just hits everything, but only certain things really get that evolutionary boost because those are the things that benefit from being smarter. So you meet a tarantula, I think, quite early on in Children of Time. And it’s mentioned that, you know, this has also become basically bigger from the nanovirus, but it hasn’t really got much smarter ’cause being smarter doesn’t particularly benefit it. In the same way that it does for the porsheds. So that’s what I’m looking for. I mean, one of the things Peter Godfrey-Smith, who wrote the octopus book I used as a lot of my research for Children of Ruin, wrote another book called Metazoa in which he mentions mantis shrimps. And I got from that that they were much more cognitively complex than I was aware of. And then because I was aware of them as just generally cool creatures with a lot of fun capabilities, I decided, right, I’m going to do the research.
[00:05:04.10] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I’ll work out what they can do and what I can do with them for the book.
[00:05:09.24] – John Knych
Awesome.
[00:05:10.22] – Brandon
Thank you.
[00:05:13.05] – John Knych
Excellent. On to Noemi.
[00:05:15.17] – Noémie
Well, you kind of responded to my question, but, um, my question was, did you contact or use a lot of outside resources to build upon the species, but also all the terraforming stuff? Um, does it come from particular research that you did, or did you contact anyone working in a field, for example, where does it come from? Because it’s at times very specific, and I just wanted to know that because it’s very fascinating to me. And thank you for being there again.
[00:05:43.22] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Oh no, you’re very welcome. So I— my preferred method of research is to find someone who knows about the subject and get them to tell me the very specific things I’m interested in, because that is by far the most efficient way of getting information. In this case, there is indeed a world authority on mantis shrimp behavior, and he retired about a week before I started researching the book, and I could not for the love of get hold of him. So I had to read 40 years of his research, which was not a waste of time because I then picked up a lot of things I didn’t know I wouldn’t have known to ask about. So that then enriched the, you know, the description of the mantis shrimps in the book. For the terraforming stuff, whilst I’ve got a, you know, I’ve done a certain amount of background reading over various sci-fi projects, I mean, other than wildly theoretical stuff, obviously we haven’t terraformed anything, and certainly not in the sort of weird, weird ways that are going on in Children of Strife. So it’s very much at that point, it’s just as long as I’m not doing something that is patently impossible as per the laws of physics, I pretty much got a free hand.
[00:06:56.01] – Noémie
I see. Thank you so much.
[00:06:59.02] – John Knych
Thank you, Noemi. For those who are arriving who have never been here before, if you don’t have a question, no big deal, just say pass. I have tons of questions, and I’m sure Brandon, Noemi, and others, others do as well. But moving on to Jen, if you have a question.
[00:07:16.13] – Noémie
I do.
[00:07:17.05] – Jenn
Yeah, thanks for being here. One thing I really loved Sorry, I’m getting over a cold— was how the book keeps coming back to identity and instincts, but through these very different characters. The manna shrimp is wrestling with his instincts, and Portofabian is sort of this blend, and Alice and Mirror just have their own thing going on. Is that something that you planned on going into this? I’m going to examine identity and instinct, or did it just sort of evolve organically as you were writing the story?
[00:07:53.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I think it’s sort of a natural fallout of the sort of things I’m writing about. So while, you know, the initial focus is let’s do the, you know, the evolutionary biology thought experiment. And if you’re doing that and if you’re putting yourself in the point of view of these various non-human characters, you really have to get into that territory if you’re being true to the topic, I think. So it’s sort of a natural outgrowth of the thing that I was initially interested in.
[00:08:27.00] – Josh
Yeah, thank you.
[00:08:32.02] – John Knych
Thank you, Jen. On to Josh.
[00:08:36.15] – Josh
Circle back around to me. I was going to ask something slightly unrelated, so I’ll go towards the end.
[00:08:45.11] – John Knych
No problem. On to Chris, if you have a question. Um, uh, no problem. Um, on to, uh, Yiding, if you have a question. Again, you can pass if you don’t.
[00:08:59.20] – Yiding
Um, I do have a question. Uh, first, uh, Adrian, thanks for being here. Um, so it’s been a while since I’ve read, uh, the previous book, Children of Memory. Um, so I might be misremembering, but it seems to me that like you have a slightly different approach, uh, approach to the, the simulations between the two books, uh, because the first book was very much about how there’s a reality to them, that they’re so complex that even though the character— the people in the simulation are are not real, they are actually real in a sense. But in this one, there’s a lot of focus on how they are not real, that they are essentially just simulations. I’m wondering, does that reflect a change in your own view towards this stuff in the intervening years?
[00:09:56.08] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I suspect that it’s inevitable that the the growth of language models and the various borderline fraudulent claims made about them has rather soured me on certain things in that general area. I think the big difference that’s here within the text is there is a significant shift between real and true. So the problem that Alice and her co-researchers have, if indeed there are actual co-researchers, um, is that they’re looking for truth. They believe— and this is, this is something that is mentioned in, in Memory— the idea that there is a deeper level of the simulation that preserves the terraformers. And so you can learn about the terraformers from that, and there is a deeper layer beyond that that preserves the makers of the machine in the first place. And that’s from Alice’s experiments does not appear to be the case. And instead, because of the reactive way that the simulation responds to people entering it, which we, again, we saw a certain amount of with Children of Membra in the way that Kern and Miranda kind of screwed everything up by just being there. If you are looking for a thing, then it will give you a thing that looks like the thing you’re looking for.
[00:11:29.06] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And at this point, I am, yes, very much thinking about how, you know, ChatGPT or similar language models are built in with this infinite confidence and zero actual knowledge so that if there is no answer, it won’t tell you there’s no answer. Or if it’s not sure of the answer, it won’t tell you that. It will just tell you an answer because it is programmed to create answer-shaped objects in response to question-shaped objects. And this is the problem that Alice is having with the simulation and, you know, that becomes sort of iterated to ridiculousness by this idea that you keep looking and you keep finding more and more levels and societies of people that couldn’t possibly exist and so forth, just because you want to find them, and the simulation knows you want to find them, and the simulation does not want to disappoint you. So a bit of both, basically.
[00:12:29.21] – John Knych
Fascinating. Thank you, Eding. Thank you, Adrian. Um, Scatha, I don’t know if you can hear me, if you want to ask a question.
[00:12:37.20] – Speaker 8
Good morning. Um, hi, Adrian. I’m a super fan girl of your work. I’ve started reading, uh, Children of Ruin. Yeah, was number one.
[00:12:50.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Uh, number two.
[00:12:52.20] – Speaker 8
Number two, Children of Ruin.
[00:12:55.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Memory Strife.
[00:12:57.02] – Speaker 8
That’s right. And they’re so intense because your writing makes you have to be really committed to your world. Um, but I find everything I’ve read, it’s very, um, Every one of your stories has left me with a different worldview. So big compliments to that because it’s changed how I think about the existing world I’m in. I really like your writing, that’s all. And Children of Strife, I felt like your— I felt your commentary to current affairs within the story, but it wasn’t overt or like it wasn’t heavy-handed, but I felt like I could hear your reflection of some of the things that are happening in the world. And I love where we ended up. I felt it was despite so much, your work to me remains very hopeful and uplifting. And I had just finished everything you did of the Tyrant Philosophers, which is a segue, but oh my God. Okay. Anyway, so I don’t know if I have any questions other than, are you going to do another one after this, I guess would be my next question.
[00:14:21.16] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
So, yeah. So this, like a lot of series I do, it’s more a sequence of books rather than an actual kind of traditional plot arc, which is something I’ve done about 3 times. It’s more usual for me to write a book and then want to write more in the settings rather than particularly pick up on an ongoing plot. So it’s possible there will be another one. I’ve got about half a book of idea currently kicking about at the back of my head, but it needs its other half before that’s ever going to be anything.
[00:15:01.20] – John Knych
Thank you, thank you, Skatha. Back to Chris, if you’re there. If Chris— or you can type in the chat. Chris, do you have a question or no? Oh, yep.
[00:15:12.03] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Yeah, yeah, thanks, Josh.
[00:15:23.19] – John Knych
You have a question, Chris, or no?
[00:15:25.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
No, I’ll be all right. It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll just enjoy the Enjoy the video. I mean, I’m happy to talk about other, other books or anything like that if you wanted to. It’s all right, Adrian. It’s, um, I’ve literally just finished Children of Strife, a great book, but, um, I’m a bit, uh, doped up on pain medication at the moment, so I’m just gonna enjoy, enjoy the, uh, the questions answered.
[00:15:52.19] – John Knych
Okay, thank you, Chris. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting Chris to be here. He just had a car accident, but I’m good. Surprised me saying I wanted to still be part of it. So thanks for being here, Chris, and feel better. Okay, a lot of good questions. Thank you, everyone. Yiding, I want to piggyback off of your question. Adrian, my favorite quote in the whole book is near the end when you said the self was more than just patterns of neurons in the brain. It was the gut and the rush of blood, 1,000 different hormones telling you how you felt, a microbiome of passengers making their demands and fighting their battles. Hadn’t felt a computer was a good model for a human mind. The— has your sense of the possibility of uploading consciousness into computers, has that also changed in the same way that you said your view of simulations has changed? Because in Children of Time, the upload is a, is a big plot point. And in some of your other books, correct me if I’m wrong, but Cage of— Cage of Souls, um, there’s a, there’s an element of uploading consciousness. Has that evolved for you, this idea that, look, no, the human identity is also these biological interactions that we just can’t ever put in a computer?
[00:17:06.14] – John Knych
Or is it still possible someday?
[00:17:08.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I mean, I think it, I think it is conceivably possible to, you know, I mean, I guess you’d be looking at something like a full-on simulation. Rather than just the traditional kind of mind upload stuff. I mean, I have, since writing Children of Time, I’ve certainly, there was a thing I was involved in about, what, 5, 6 years ago, which involved a whole bunch of scientists talking to a whole bunch of novelists, and a number of them were talking about brain uploading. Whether it’s ever going to be possible in any way seemed to be about a 50-50 split between them, which was quite interesting. But One of the things I also picked up on was at around the time I was writing Children of Time, the, the, our understanding of like the microbiome and the other and the, its interactivity with, you know, ourselves and our cognitive processes was just kind of coming in. And I’ve read up quite a bit about that since. And it does seem, I mean, I think there is this traditional science fiction thing about the brain in the jar, which I guess we’re talking like 1960s, ’70s sci-fi, you tend to see that turning up quite a lot.
[00:18:24.01] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And that very much is the model for the idea of an uploaded consciousness and a computer. And the problem is most of those models, and they are quite old, a lot of them, they are based on the idea, well, it’s the brain. And now we know that an awful lot of what is us, as per that paragraph, because obviously, you know, that’s explicitly what I’m talking about, is going on throughout the body. And so if you were able to upload, it would— I don’t think it is necessarily flat out impossible, but I think it would need a much more holistic approach to what consciousness is than simply, say, duplicating the you know, the electrochemical signals in the brain, because you would get something out of that, I guess, but it wouldn’t be a self in any way because we are much, much more than just what’s going on in the brain. I mean, and this, this isn’t— this actually ties in to a lot of the, uh, the Children series themes. Um, a lot of the creatures I’m talking about which have this extremely complex set of behaviors like the portia spiders or the mantis shrimps and certainly appear to have an internality from the way they behave.
[00:19:46.01] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And obviously that’s not a thing we can ever necessarily know, but it’s, you know, from outward show, that does appear to be the case. They have very little of what we think of as a brain and we for a very large, a long period of time in science and medicine, we’ve kind of assumed that our enormous brains are basically the be-all and end-all to intelligence. You know, it’s when you, when you, when you— the idea of brain in a jar is quite understandable from that point of view. But looking at what creatures can do with much, much smaller brains, you have to conclude, well, maybe our brains are actually not terribly efficiently laid out. I mean, certainly it appears like bird brains like the corvids in memory, bird brains seem to be much more efficient than human brains pound for pound. The human, it’s just the human brains are much, much bigger. But, and it’s no, I’m not, I don’t want to go anywhere near the old idea of, oh well, we only use 90, you know, 10% of our brains or anything like that, which is absolute nonsense. But it may well be the case that our brains have evolved in a way that, you know, they could have been half the size and just as good.
[00:20:54.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
If they had been more efficiently formed, because evolution doesn’t necessarily find the best way, it just finds a way that works. And so I’m completely rambling now, but you can see the— yeah, I certainly, I am. There’s been some fascinating stuff about uploading and also just about human consciousness that means I would probably have to approach that Avrana Kern section in Time a little more, a little differently now. I I’d still be able to do it. I’d just have to kind of fudge it in slightly different ways and make reference to these things as part of it. I guess there is no way you, no reason why if your upload system is sufficiently good, you could not sort of simulate the various other parts of the whole.
[00:21:54.08] – John Knych
Fascinating. Or use a planet, right? You use the life on a planet to do it too. Uh, all right, back to Brandon.
[00:22:02.10] – Brandon
Uh, yeah, I want to go kind of a little bit off of that previous question in a little bit different direction. So Kern in this one is kind of a copy of, I guess, a copy of a copy. So my question is At what point does a copy become its own? Let’s call it a person. Is it in your— what is, what is your view of this? Is it as soon as it copies, it’s a, it’s a new person, or does it have to gather a certain amount of memories before it becomes a distinct entity, or do you think it’s the exact same as the, as the copy?
[00:22:41.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I mean, like, I think that I mean, they’re the difference between is it a new person and is this a different person? So I think as soon as you have a copy and it’s not sort of constantly in contact with the original, it must be a new person. It can still be a new person who that is initially exactly the same. And once it has any kind of different experience, then that must lead to a divergence. Of person because we are influenced by everything that’s happened to us. And what seems to have been happening in the, with Kern is that you have these individual copies that kind of go out and become different and then essentially become gestalt Kerns based on the combination of all the experiences, which is of course very similar to how the Noden entity works. In that if you get a bunch of nodon cells from diff— that have been— that have had different experiences and bring them together, there will be a library of all those experiences and still be a singular kind of consciousness. So, so it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s essentially a kind of a, uh, convergent evolution of consciousness between the artificial and the, um, alien.
[00:24:01.19] – Brandon
Thank you.
[00:24:03.15] – John Knych
Thanks, Brandon. Uh, Josh, we’ll jump— I know we skipped you before. Do you want— are you still contemplating, or, uh, should we keep going around the circle?
[00:24:13.24] – Josh
Um, I have one I could jump in on quickly. First off, lovely to chat to you, Adrian. It’s, it’s really cool to see you here. Um, thanks for doing this. Um, you mentioned a few years ago you were talking to a bunch of sci-fi writers, were to a bunch of scientists. Um, were you—
[00:24:34.15] – Jenn
was it about—
[00:24:35.10] – Josh
I think it was a different one where the Ministry of Defense asked a—
[00:24:39.11] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
that was much more recent. Yeah, yeah. So that, that one led to the stories that are in the recently published Creative Futures, um, collection, which did, did not in fact win the British Science Fiction Award but was up for it. Um, The other one, I believe there was supposed to be a collection. I don’t think it’s come out, and I suspect it probably never will because it was all, you know, it was all being organized by one writer, and writers are not terribly good at organizing things. But it was a fascinating thing to be involved in, and you know, you’re basically just getting a lot of sort of free insight and ideas from all of these scientists, and there was a story written for that. I’m just, I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day.
[00:25:22.22] – Josh
Fair enough. So was that with the defense one, or was that—
[00:25:28.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
No, the defense one all happened, and quite possibly may continue to go on for that matter. And, you know, like I say, that book came out. This other one was some years beforehand, 3 or 4 years beforehand, and was mostly focused on that kind of, uh, man-machine interaction.
[00:25:54.07] – Josh
And in terms of when you’re in those— that kind of setting, uh, what’s the kind of split between, let’s say, more hard sci-fi writers, people who put a lot more kind of into the, the here and now, how it might happen, versus more kind of, um, I don’t want to say soft sci-fi, but more kind of Maybe less rigorous to the science. Yeah, out there kind of thinking, I suppose, is the best way.
[00:26:27.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Which, so for the one I did way back, I’m trying to think who else was even on that. I think that was more geared towards I mean, the thing is with that sort of story, at the end of the day, writing a story that is trying to faithfully reproduce the really quite arcane technical stuff you’ve learned from these people who are right at the cutting edge of the field is almost certainly going to fail because you end up with a story that is absolutely crammed with fairly indigestible stuff. So what tends to happen is those technical details will get internalized by the writers and the writers will, what the writers are going to write about is what will this change. So you’re not necessarily going into the technicalities of precisely how it all works. You’re interested in if this became a technology that was readily available, where would it be applied? Who would have access to it? How would, what knock-on effects would that have? And so, you’re dealing with that boundary between the technical hard science fiction and the social hard science fiction. And in both cases, you’re still— it’s still hard science fiction because you are working with the constraints of what the world allows.
[00:27:53.04] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
But honestly, I mean, certainly from my point of view, the social side of that, i.e., what is the impact of it, is far more interesting than just how it works. Certainly for the Ministry of Defense stuff, which being more recent, I can remember rather more about, there was quite a widespread, but I don’t recall there being anyone there who would only have been interested in the technical stuff because really what they were interested in was what should we be worried about in the future that we are not currently looking at? It wasn’t a full-on military thing, but it was basically what, where are the shocks coming from? And they had various sort of themed sessions. So there was an environment-based session, there was an economy-based session, and that, you know, and sort of a social technology-based session, that kind of thing. And different writers are in on different ones. Cool.
[00:28:47.21] – Josh
And you said the first one was Creative Futures?
[00:28:50.00] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Creative Futures is the Ministry of Defense one. I will be putting up shortly on my website, they’ve just posted up one of my stories from that collection as free access online. So if you do want to go and have a look at the one, certainly the one I wrote that they were most interested in, and the one that honestly seems, you know, the world has kind of moved rather more towards it since I wrote it than I would have liked, then yeah, that one is now freely available. I’ll stick a link up via my website shortly.
[00:29:22.17] – Speaker 8
Cool.
[00:29:22.24] – Josh
Yeah, no, I’ll definitely check that out. Thank you.
[00:29:25.01] – John Knych
Thank you very much. Thank you, Josh. Back to Noemi.
[00:29:30.09] – Noémie
Yes, it’s not much of a question, but more of an observation that can lead to a question. But I couldn’t help but see some similarities between this book and Alien Clay in the sense that nature is almost like a conscious entity or character on its own in this book. And, you know, like the nature changing everything it touches and not defiling because that’s not what it is, right? But it has such a strong characterization in this book and as it had in Alien Clay in some ways. And I wanted to know, was it planned for you in the beginning to have this almost body horror kind of thing? I mean, it’s something that horrifies me, that also fascinates me. You know, that’s very Jeff VanderMeer kind of science fiction as well, like the changing, the modification of nature on the body. And I’m lost in my question, but I hope that you see what I mean. Like, it’s very similar to Alien Clay in some ways, this nature as an entity, as a character. And I was wondering why this almost changed between Children of Time and Children of Strife. It’s such a different way of characterizing nature and yeah, nature in general, for lack of a better word.
[00:30:45.22] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Yeah, I mean, you can kind of see what’s going on on the planet in Children of Strife as what if Alien Clay, but rubbish. And it’s, you know, I guess some of it arose organically in the kind of the creative process when I was doing the world building stage of things. With other bits, it’s very much you’ve got this group of people and they are terrible, terrible people and they get, by pure serendipity, they come across what should be the most amazing thing ever. And they ruin it. And that’s kind of what’s going on there. So it’s really, it is, it’s the idea of, well, you know, it doesn’t really matter how incredible your innovation actually is if the people who have their hands on the tiller are just appalling people with no real imagination. And so that’s what’s going on with Strife. I mean, it’s, I suspect that this idea of the interconnected ecosphere is something I’ll almost certainly come back to in other books as well. It’s just something that’s very much there in my head. You’re muted, John. Here we go.
[00:32:09.00] – John Knych
Thank you. Thank you, Noemi. Back to Jen, I believe, if I got the— The order correct?
[00:32:16.06] – Jenn
Sure, thanks. Um, I was just wondering about the challenges of returning to an established universe versus creating something, uh, new. Like, um, when you come back to this world or, or any of your series, um, how do you make each book feel distinct but part of the whole? Are there specific challenges that you face there?
[00:32:41.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
There’s always the problem of, well, like, you know, you can just end up doing the same thing over again, which you just have to sort of consciously watch out for so as not to repeat yourself. I think where you are writing just new stories in the setting like I’m doing here, that makes it maybe a little easier because you’re always going off in a different direction with a different group of characters, and so you’re not going to end up doing that kind of middle of the enormous fantasy epic thing where everyone’s just trudging around between towns fighting goblins or whatever they’re doing. There’s, with this series in particular, there’s a bit of an extra pressure because it’s very much my flagship series. It’s, you know, Children of Time was the book that sort of put me on the map as a writer. And so if I am writing a new book in this in this setting, it’s got to be a solid one with a lot of good ideas in it and something interesting to say, which is why, you know, I don’t do a lot of these. You know, I could theoretically basically just churn one out each year with a different animal and you have to say, hey, it’s tapirs this year and it’s capybara the next and whatever, and that would get old quite quickly, I suspect.
[00:33:52.06] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And as well as that, the books need something sort of on the philosophical level. So I mean, that’s basically what I’m waiting for. For any, any, any, any fifth book will definitely need something with that kind of, um, sort of heavyweight aspect to it to come along and add to the, uh, you know, the fun creature stuff I’ve already got.
[00:34:17.04] – Jenn
Thank you.
[00:34:18.22] – John Knych
Thank you, Jen.
[00:34:19.24] – Yiding
Um, back to, um, you have, um Yeah, okay, so I’m wondering about the process of creating all these made-up names because you do that in sci-fi and fantasy as well. And I just feel like after you’ve written so many books, like, does it get to a point where it’s harder and harder to come up with names that actually sound good? Like, what is your process for creating all these nonsense names essentially?
[00:34:50.08] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I mean, there are multiple processes. So if I’m doing a very deep worldbuilding thing, like with the Terran Philosophers, then the names are going to be culturally specific. So with each particular group of people I’m talking about, they’ll have a particular sort of feel to their names. And as long as they all fit in within that, and that’s very much something I sort of, I pioneered for myself doing the Shadows of the Apkka. There are loads of different cultures of that, all of them have naming merchants. And so you end up with the situation, you know, you hear a name, you’re like, I kind of know where that character is likely to come from because of the name that they’ve got. And then that hopefully gives you something that sounds, feels very organic and in setting, even though, you know, I mean, arguably are not all names Nodson names. I would say, yeah, we don’t even where names have, I mean, certainly Certainly in Western cultures, even where names have a meaning, that meaning tends to be quite deeply buried so that it’s not what we’re thinking of when we come across a name. In the Children series, certainly in the later books, the names tend to— I tend to play with references so that a lot of the names in Children of Memory are inspired by Norse mythology because that’s what I was doing then.
[00:36:12.17] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And the names in this book also have a literary inspiration, which is probably fairly obvious when you get only a little way into the book. And it’s, I mean, really, that’s, I’m kind of doing that purely for my own amusement. But you, I guess the third part of the answer is, as a writer, you get a sense for what sounds right as a name. And, you know, you’ll play around with variants and, you know, change vowels and consonants and so forth sometimes until you I mean, yeah, that’s the one that fits. And therefore, hopefully you don’t end up with anything that actually, you know, the readers just burst out laughing at because it’s inadvertently hilarious or anything like that. And you have a sense of, well, if the name is like this and this is kind of the connotation you’re getting from those sounds or those particular, you know, just that particular set of letters on the page. It’s definitely a part of the craft, is coming up with names that sound right.
[00:37:21.22] – Yiding
Interesting.
[00:37:23.19] – John Knych
Thank you, Yiding. This question also has to do with craft, Adrian. In previous talks, you’ve mentioned, one, that you enjoy the process of writing. Sometimes writers talk about it being you know, just a grind, but for you it’s joy. And two, you’ve mentioned in previous talk that you, you world, you love world building, that that just comes naturally to you, and that in some books you’ve built the world and then you’ve put the story in. So my question to you is somewhat left field, but when I read this quote about Radhina Kott where she said, you know, the perfectly natural rewards she felt when messed and merging with an entire responsive biosphere. She was the world. She was the mother goddess who ate her bug children. Those scenes where you describe like the ecstasy of being the world and building the world, is that how you feel about the worlds that you build in that you become them in a sense? And do you ever as a writer just get lost in them and sometimes think like, I just want to be in this book and not be anywhere else.
[00:38:34.00] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Yeah, I mean, I think I’m at least drawing on that, yeah, when it’s going really well in the writing process or in the, you know, and you have a real sense of the world you’re writing in as a real place that exists and the people in it as people with their own kind of independence, which varies from book to book. I’m kind of drawing on that. I mean, this is what I mean with the idea that they, you know, they, the 5 of them get given this incredible gift by the way that their system sort of shakes out and then basically aren’t in any way equipped to do anything worthwhile with it because of the sort of people they are. And yes, I think as a writer, you are generally aware that in order to write books, you’ve got to be a terrible person. You know, or at least there must be a terrible person in you because setting up plots and kind of drama and so forth involves you having horrible things happening to the imaginary people that you have created. And that’s, you know, that is fairly universal in narrative. And so you’re kind, you know, you are aware that you are the person that writes the chapter where this dreadful thing has happened to someone and they’re utterly distraught and the readers are going to be terribly set, and you kind of just go away rubbing your hands and cackling because you’ve done a good job.
[00:39:52.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And so to a certain extent, I am satirizing myself and my profession with the way that they carry on once they have this world at their disposal.
[00:40:05.01] – John Knych
Excellent. Thank you. Yeah, no, it’s— I wondered that, whether it was sort of like a self-reflective process. And then one really quick question before we go back around the horn. You describe Radina Kott as like a as a court jester. Do you also sort of describe, like, did you— how much do you relate to Radina Kott in, in a sense?
[00:40:26.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
So, uh, I mean, so Radina Kott is a character archetype I use a lot, and it’s an archetype that can be used as a positive or negative sort of character. Um, I don’t think it’s a me archetype particularly. I mean, if I am any of those people on the space station, it’s Pil, because he’s the bug guy. I have been called out on that on Blue Sky, and kind of, yeah, okay, that’s a fair cop. But there, Redina is the sort of character I really enjoy writing, just because she is kind of witty and clever and funny in a way that I’m not, but I always felt kind of would would be quite fun to be.
[00:41:18.05] – John Knych
Thank you. All right, back to Brandon.
[00:41:22.06] – Brandon
So in this, I, uh, for— I have a question for your writing process for Children of Strife. So in this one, you have the 3 different time periods, the ages. So did you write these in the order that they’re presented in the book, or did you write each of them separately? And just how did you kind of put those together?
[00:41:41.17] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Yeah, I mean, I decided I basically had to write them in chronological order as they happened in the universe. So all of the part one, all of the, all of the, you know, the Terraformer era stuff, then all of the Arkship era stuff, then all of the current stuff, because I needed to know in detail for each subsequent group what they were going to find, which is not the way I normally go about things. It’s the way I’ve gone about things for this series particularly. So I did it for Memory and for Ruin, but it does considerably lengthen the writing process because once you’ve written those individual eras, you then have to work out how are you going to fit them together. And what that can often mean is you need to rejig precisely what information the reader is getting at different points so that they’re not being spoiled too early by revelations or that they’re not being denied information that they actually do need to make sense of it. And so, because of that, the writing process for Strife took me about twice as long as it normally would for a book, just because I was spending so long going backwards and forwards and juggling them about.
[00:42:51.13] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And I had to go off and get beta readers just to read it because at that point you’re very close to the narrative and you need someone who has read the previous books but not this one who can say, “Yes, that makes sense,” or, “No, it doesn’t.” So would you say this one had more revisions than you normally do then? Yeah, I mean, certainly like the backend part after the, you know, essentially the 3 first draft manuscripts were individually produced was just an order of magnitude more complicated than it normally is.
[00:43:25.15] – Yiding
Thank you.
[00:43:27.16] – John Knych
Interesting. Back to Noemi.
[00:43:31.14] – Noémie
Yes, I mean, it was kind of the question I wanted to ask Brendan, so good one. My question also was for this book in particular, because it is a fourth of a series, did you have to go back and read the previous ones because maybe you missed something or maybe a character name, something very silly that you don’t necessarily remember, or did you just go with it and then maybe the beta readers went back and said, hey, maybe this is not something that was in the previous book, so you needed to explain more, go back before? Like, what was your process for— obviously a series is a bit different than a standalone, so did you have to go back and read the previous books before you did this one?
[00:44:10.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Yeah, not so much with these, because really, other than Kern, there’s relatively little content I could— I did go back and read some bits of memory where I was specifically talking about the simulation, basically just to make sure I was not wildly departing from that. But overall, the points where it links to previous books are very general. There are certainly other series where I do, where I have had to do that. So for example, I’ve just written a third expert systems book and I absolutely had to go back and do the other two. And for the 5th Tyrant Philosopher’s book where they’re going back to Ilmar, I did then go back through City of Last Chances just to get all the little details that would’ve fallen outta my head between them.
[00:45:01.10] – Noémie
That makes sense. Thank you so much.
[00:45:04.05] – John Knych
Great to hear there’s another expert system coming. Back to Josh. Or you can pass.
[00:45:15.05] – Josh
Go ahead and pass.
[00:45:16.24] – John Knych
Back to Jen, or, or you can pass.
[00:45:20.24] – Jenn
Um, everyone’s hit on my questions that I had left, so I’ll pass it along.
[00:45:25.11] – John Knych
On to, uh, Yiding, unless you want to pass.
[00:45:29.18] – Yiding
Yeah, I do have a question. Um, so, so the, uh, the, the chapters involving the, uh Radhina Kott and her peers, they’re very entertaining. And at the same time, these are very, very awful, insufferable people. So I’m just wondering, what is the trick to writing such insufferable people, but in a way that’s still very fascinating for the reader?
[00:46:01.08] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I mean, I think it’s adding that humor, basically finding the angle for humor, which in this case is just— it’s Cot herself is a character who lends herself to humor because she does not take things seriously in the same way that Hartmund or Dorcheson does, which means, you know, if you were getting those same scenes narrated through the eyes of one of the other characters, it would probably be rather grueling as a reading experience. Because they are all horrible people, and Cot is not necessarily that much less horrible than the others, but she is at least entertaining as a narrator. And so, I mean, it’s something, weirdly enough, it’s something I learned from a lot of the better grimdark writers. So Abercrombie or Parker, say, that they are often, when they are writing about the grimmest possible stuff, they are often being extremely funny with it, and that makes the— it leavens the reading experience in a way that if they hadn’t done that, the books would probably have been really quite hard to read. And it also means that, you know, when the terrible thing does happen, you get an extra gut punch because the reader has been put off their guard because of the tone.
[00:47:21.03] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
But I genuinely believe that if you’re going to get really bleak, you also want to get funny. And this is why, you know, service model ends up like it does, for example, because it’s basically talking about the complete collapse of an entire civilization, but through the eyes of a rather bewildered robot. So it’s funny.
[00:47:40.15] – Speaker 8
Thank you.
[00:47:43.01] – John Knych
Thank you, Yiting. Good questions, everyone. And I feel like we’re doing groupthink because they’re segueing into things I want to talk about. This question relates to what Yiting just said. The group of insufferable characters, and also what Skad said before about how she sensed it was somewhat social commentary, your take on these characters. Because at one point you write, they could have all probably clubbed together and revived Earth itself, crowded and toxic as it was, but then they’d have to share it with the proles. My question is, were you in writing these characters also pushing your views on today’s world where we have people who have enormous power and technology and influence who are, we could say, some might say monsters? Or was your writing of these characters just, you know, their own, its own circus? You know, was there a subtle social commentary going on here or no?
[00:48:43.00] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I mean, I don’t think the social commentary I’m doing there is subtle by any means. I, you know, there have been a number of my books that have gone in this direction. There’s Bearhead and there’s last year’s Hungry Gods. And it’s, yeah, we are entering a kind of an existential phase of human history where an unprecedentedly small number of people have an unprecedented amount of power. And they have that power because they are the worst possible type of people who’ve stopped at nothing to get it. And yes, I mean, I think that the quote that you’ve read out there about, I think if you look at sort of certain oligarchs’ ambitions for Mars or something like that, this is just the reason they don’t want, they would rather set up a, what would be probably a terrifyingly grim colony on Mars rather than rejuvenating Earth is they can’t own Earth in the way that they would be able to own Mars. and I feel that it’s not unreasonable to call that out as a writer, but also it’s just, I can put that sort of thing in my books or I can scream it out the window.
[00:49:58.07] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And if I scream it out of the window, people will get annoyed.
[00:50:03.10] – John Knych
Thank you. Um, all right, so maybe one last round of questions. I have, uh, like two more, but, um, if then any last questions, uh, Brandon, do you wanna, wanna ask another one?
[00:50:14.14] – Brandon
Yeah, so I’ve heard you talk about the one big lie in science fiction. So my question is, what’s the one big lie in Children of Strife?
[00:50:24.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Oh, that’s an interesting question. I think that I couldn’t point to the precise bit, but it would be somewhere within the, the kind of terraforming to godhood pipeline. I think that at that point I’m working with a science that is sort of so hand-wavy and so out there that there are, you know, if you were to put it under a microscope, you’d probably find some bits where it didn’t quite join up. But because that is the thing, you know, as you say, you can, you get away with the one big lie. That’s, you know, it doesn’t necessarily matter because it works narratively.
[00:51:19.10] – Brandon
Good answer.
[00:51:20.01] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Thanks.
[00:51:21.14] – John Knych
Thanks, Brandon. Back to Noemi.
[00:51:24.01] – Noémie
Yes. Was there one part of the book or one scene maybe that really stood out to you? And what did you feel like when you wrote that part? Specifically one, no spoilers, of course, but Was there one that really stood out for you, maybe like a horizon scene like we say in movies, like this, the reason why you wrote the book essentially, maybe?
[00:51:47.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
So not that, but there is like a serious and a non-serious answer to this question. The serious one is there are some scenes with, especially when I think it’s the scene when they have just left Earth on the ark ship. And before the key crew go into suspension, which kind of brought a lump to my throat because I knew what these people were going to hit, were going to hit. But it was just— I had been— before I wrote that arkship section, all the bits on Earth, I didn’t really understand actually how genuinely creditable and courageous and actually noble that whole business was, you know, and that, you know, it is a— it is also a quite grim setup they’ve got on Earth. But just having the, you know, Captain Kasimir and her crew just having that level of sort of camaraderie and solidarity, I thought I really— I felt like, yeah, I got that scene exactly as I had wanted it. The non-serious answer is there’s There’s a sequence where Kato the mantis shrimp on a hovercraft leaps backwards off a giant jellyfish shooting pterodactyls with a machine gun. And I’m just like, how are my publishers going to let me get away with this ridiculous scene?
[00:53:12.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
And somehow it came through the editing process unscathed. And so—
[00:53:16.08] – Noémie
That was a great scene. So I’m happy that I let you do that. Thank you so much.
[00:53:26.00] – John Knych
Good question, Noemi, thank you. Yeah, I just had an idea for these talks, which none of you have to do if you don’t want to, but it’d be nice if at the end of each talk we like share the scene or moment that moved us the most in the book. So you don’t have to do that. I have mine when it gets back to me. But Jen, do you have a question or a final sort of scene you liked? Pass? Back to Josh.
[00:53:55.01] – Josh
The first scene that comes to my head is probably actually from Firewalkers, which is probably, what, 5, 6 years ago now? More than that. There’s a point right at the end where— I think it’s right at the end. Where they kind of finally get up onto the ship and looking around this ship that’s basically been— had everyone on it murdered, sent into space. And just a reflection of the whole story up to that point and the anger that led to that decision from people was quite impactful.
[00:54:41.02] – John Knych
That’s the one that—
[00:54:41.21] – Josh
always sticks in my head. I think it’s probably because it was the first book I read from you.
[00:54:45.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Thank you. I like that. Yes, 5 years ago.
[00:54:52.01] – John Knych
Thank you, Josh. Back to Yiding.
[00:54:57.18] – Yiding
Are we still doing questions?
[00:54:59.10] – John Knych
If you have a question or just a moment that you enjoyed in the book.
[00:55:04.07] – Yiding
I do have both. In terms of moments, I liked all the codas, the very last few chapters, each coda for each character or group of characters, they, they really got to me. I got like, I got a bit choked up at some of them. Yeah. Uh, but my question though is, okay, so I love the, the whole concept of the crew of the Dissenter, and that seems to be something that you’ve played around a lot with in recent books. Um, like in the Entire Philosophers, you have the, the mass units of all those healers, and you had the, I think they’re called the Heretics in your, in the most recent book in the series. So is that something that really speaks to you lately, this idea of like this eclectic group of very different people, a bunch of weirdos who have to work together?
[00:55:47.19] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I think it’s just— I don’t think it’s anything profound. I think once you’ve got a group of characters like that, it just means that they are far more interesting because of their differences and because each one of them has their own little peculiarities and it gives you a richer dynamic between them. And it’s just more fun to write, to be honest.
[00:56:11.12] – Yiding
Makes sense.
[00:56:13.16] – John Knych
Thank you, Yiding. My last moment I enjoyed and question I want to ask you, Adrian, I was talking with Brandon a little bit about this before you arrived. I was kind of looking down at Cato throughout the beginning of the book in that he spoke in this jagged poetry. He’s punchy martial guy, and I kind of thought he was a little ridiculous. But a small moment that just deeply moved me was near the end when it was shown that his language— there’s actually these huge epic, like these epics that are expressed in the language between the stormopods, but that the translator just wasn’t able to capture it. I just, I love that moment. I mean, I love translation, and I love that idea that As a reader, I was just like, yeah, this is a military punchy mantis shrimp. But in fact, there’s just a lot more that the translator just couldn’t get. So I like that surprise, and it made me think about, yeah, what’s being unsaid. So yeah, Adrian, I love that there’s just wonder and awe in all your books in sort of what’s possible with creatures, with evolution. But my last question, and this is another left-field question, Like Gustave Flaubert said that he believed he was not living in the right time period.
[00:57:33.16] – John Knych
I think it was Gustave Flaubert. Do you believe that you’re not— do you feel that about this epoch, this time period that like as your identity, do you sometimes yearn for having been born in a different time or no?
[00:57:50.04] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I mean, I don’t. I am lucky enough to be born in a time of unparalleled scientific advance and knowledge where, you know, shortly before my birth, we went to the moon. We are exploring the depths of the sea. We are understanding things about the cosmos that no one in the past has ever known. You know, we have a grasp of the evolutionary history of life on this planet that just didn’t exist at any other time. My regret is that it looks like it’s going to be too short, and at the point where we’re discovering so much about life on this planet, we’re also destroying so much about life on this planet. And so it feels as though there was, at some point within my own lived history, there was a sort of a golden moment of balance, and now things are tipping the other way. But maybe that’s what everyone thinks when they get to my age.
[00:58:47.15] – John Knych
Maybe, well, we’ll see. Okay, that’s all I have. Anyone have any final questions? I really enjoyed this talk.
[00:58:58.03] – Brandon
No question, but I have to agree with Adrian on living in this time period. It’s a good one. And I love the mantis shrimp too, so thanks again. Thanks again for joining us today.
[00:59:13.10] – John Knych
Thank you, Adrian. And everyone, I’ll post this. It’s recorded, so appreciate everyone being here. Enjoyed the talk, and thank you, Adrian.
[00:59:22.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Excellent. Thank you very much for inviting me.
[00:59:24.18] – John Knych
Everyone have a good day.
[00:59:26.09] – Noémie
Thank you for being here. Have a good day.
[00:59:28.01] – John Knych
Bye.