Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of the most prolific and consistently inventive writers working in British science fiction and fantasy. He is the author of the Shadows of the Apt sequence, the Children of Time trilogy, the Final Architecture trilogy, the Tyrant Philosophers series, the Dogs of War books, the Echoes of the Fall trilogy, and a steadily growing shelf of standalone novels and novellas across most of the major genres of the field.

Born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire in 1972, Tchaikovsky studied zoology and psychology at the University of Reading before going into the law. He spent many years as a legal executive in Reading and then in Leeds, where he still lives. The zoology degree has turned out to be the more useful of his qualifications for current purposes, since a working knowledge of how actual living organisms behave is the through-line of almost everything he has written.

He arrived on the scene in 2008 with Empire in Black and Gold, the first volume of the Shadows of the Apt sequence, which spent the next six years running to ten books. In 2016 he won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Children of Time, the science fiction novel about uplifted spiders that quietly became one of the most beloved SF novels of the decade and made him, somewhat retrospectively, a major figure in the genre. At the 2023 Worldcon his Children of Time series was awarded the Hugo for Best Series, which he declined. He has since added BSFA Best Novel wins for Children of Ruin, Shards of Earth and City of Last Chances, a British Fantasy Award, a Sidewise Award for Alternate History for Doors of Eden, and a shortlist on roughly everything else the field has on offer.

The range is the other thing worth noticing. The Shadows of the Apt cycle is high fantasy with an insect conceit. The Children of Time trilogy is hard-ish SF about uplift, evolution and the limits of communication between minds that do not share a body plan. The Final Architecture trilogy is widescreen space opera, the kind that used to be the preserve of writers who had spent thirty years building up to it. The Dogs of War books are near-future bioethics in a war-crimes wrapper. The Tyrant Philosophers sequence is grimdark imperial fantasy with an unexpectedly humane conscience. Echoes of the Fall is an Iron Age shapeshifter epic. Cage of Souls is dying-Earth. Doors of Eden is a parallel world. Service Model is a comic robot picaresque. Alien Clay is a prison-colony exobiology novel. Shroud is whatever Shroud turns out to be. Among the novels there is a steady drip of novellas, Elder Race, Ogres, Walking to Aldebaran, One Day All This Will Be Yours, Saturation Point, Lives of Bitter Rain, plus a handful of Warhammer tie-ins for sport. He writes in most of the genres he touches better than the specialists who only write in one of them, which is rude.

The pace at which all of this is produced has become genuinely legendary on the UK SF circuit. There is a running joke that we are going to need to institute an Adrian Tchaikovsky Award for the best Adrian Tchaikovsky book of the year by Adrian Tchaikovsky, because nobody else is plausibly going to win it. The frequency with which he turns up on multiple awards shortlists in the same year, occasionally in multiple categories, supports the joke more than it dignifies the field.

By his own account, Tchaikovsky is a keen live role-player and an occasional amateur actor, and has trained in stage-fighting. He keeps no exotic or dangerous pets of any kind, possibly excepting his son.