Tchaikovsky has scooped a clutch of awards for his work, including the Arthur C Clarke Award for Children of Time and the BSFA Best Novel gong for its sequel. However, things do not go quite according to the script, resulting in a race of sentient spiders who share the planet with the human colonists. In the first book, a human mission plans to introduce ape species to a new world and infect them with a virus designed to speed up evolution and elevate their intelligence within hundreds of years. While the Shadows of the Apt series successfully combined science and magic, for his next series, which began with 2015’s Children of Time, Tchaikovsky concentrates more on science fiction tropes that are at once familiar and yet wholly his own.Ĭhildren of Time, and its 2019 sequel Children of Ruin, look at the concept of terraforming distant alien planets. That’s a very simplistic precis of Tchaikovsky’s thoughtful, nuanced backdrop to stories that are both high-concept and character-driven. The idea first came to him when he was at university and running a role-playing game called Bugworld – its basic scenario of an insectoid race under attack from a wasp empire formed the basis of his fictional world, populated by the technological Apt and the magic-using Inapt.

This kicked off what would be a ten-book series and introduced his highly original universe, populated by different humanoid races with the characteristics of insects. Take Tchaikovsky’s series Shadows of the Apt, which began with his debut novel Empire of Black and Gold, published in 2008. Mephistophelian beard notwithstanding, he’s also a thoroughly nice chap if you run into him at a con or event, if somewhat a little over-fond of creepy-crawly sort of things.

Studying zoology and psychology at Reading, he then worked for a solicitor’s in Leeds, West Yorkshire, where he now lives and cuts a tall, imposing figure. Tchaikovsky, born in Lincolnshire in 1972, had a varied career before he became a full-time writer in 2018. Adrian Tchaikovsky loves spiders almost as much as you hate them. His work is on an epic scale, crossing galaxies and tackling the big themes – aliens, artificial intelligence, the relationship between magic and technology, the divide between gods and mortals. Adrian Tchaikovsky is, if you’ll excuse the painfully obvious pun, a maestro of science fiction and fantasy.

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