Interviewing Adrian Tchaikovsky
Hello!!!
Last week I reviewed Bear Head the next story in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War universe. Adrian very kindly agreed to answer some questions on the book and what else to look forward to this year
How would you book tempt Bear Head?
AT: Honestly Head of Zeus’s little teaser on their ad landed 100%. “Jimmy Martin smuggles illegal data in his headspace. But now it’s talking to him. And it claims to be a bear.” Simultaneously utterly insane and entirely accurate. Throw in a radical way to colonise Mars (what if instead of changing Mars to fit people we changed people to fit Mars) and some down and nasty politics and you have Bear Head.
Were you always planning to return to the Dogs of War universe?
AT: Honestly, no. I’d batted about a few ideas but nothing had stuck, Then, during a convention, about 2/3 of the plot arrived in a dream, I kid you not. I scribbled it down and got to work on the book as soon as I’d worked out what was missing. It really was the most extraordinary thing, never happened before or since.
What made you decide your villain needed to reflect our least favourite US President?
AT: I mean that’s in there, but his looming presence on the world stage kind of occludes the fact that he’s by no means unique or alone in that particular array of personality traits, nor the only beneficiary of what Honey called “game and metagame” in the text. It’s a widespread phenomenon, profoundly worrying in that it shows how human nature can be hacked as easily as an unprotected computer, even without all the sophisticated headware that the book’s world has. But yes, the fact that the book has landed in January 2021 gives it a particular resonance.
Human bio-engineering for Mars? Was this fun to research?
AT: Honestly I couldn’t find much. If people are actually looking at engineering human beings to survive in extreme environments (i.e. even the ‘soft’ Mars that they’ve got as far as creating in the Hellas Planitia), it’s not something I found any trace of. However, my wider background in zoology did give me quite the toolkit to imagine people being gifted with: extra eyelids, internal dust filters, antifreeze blood, all sorts of useful little tools for being a Martian.
What do you enjoy most about writing non-human characters?
AT: I think it always comes down to the contract between their POV and the human view my readers will be used to. You can have a lot of fun following the rabbit hole of what changes when you shift species, and you can throw a lot of light on what it is to be human too. Plus there’s a certain mythic feel to having nonhuman characters in a human world. Honey is an engineered bear, but bears have a place in our ancestral meme-box. Bears mean things – many contradictory things, but there’s definitely a resonance there, with bears and dogs (and spiders, even).
What’s next for you and where can we find out more from you?
AT: I’m not the best at updating my blog, so watching Twitter (@aptshadow) is probably best. Right now I have three (!) more books coming out in 2021. There’s The Expert System’s Champion at the end of this month, (Tor.com, sequel to The Expert System’s Brother), and then in March my black comedy about the worst ever time traveller, One Day All This Will Be Yours (Rebellion), which I just recorded the audio for myself. In May (a little later in the US) there’s the start of my big space opera trilogy, Shards of Earth (Pan/Macmillan/Orbit). As for beyond that plenty of plans and a couple of books submitted and in the pipeline, including more space opera, and more novellas from Rebellion and Tor.com. And I’m currently tinkering about with a third Children of… book.
If you could make everyone read one book (not your own) what would it be?
AT: Damn, that’s putting me on the spot. It’s also a bit of a poisoned chalice, with that wording. I mean they ‘made’ everyone at my school read Far From the Madding Crowd and that’s why we all still hate it with a passion like a thousand exploding suns. I think, for a perfect balance of intense character, fine writing and topical relevance, I’d go for After Atlas by Emma Newman. It’s a book that’s stuck with me for a long time.
