David talks with prolific science fiction author Adrian Tchaikovsky about his journey from childhood to successful author. We explore his influences, methodology, mindset and discover the book that made him cry.

Bio:

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series, from the first volume, Empire In Black and Gold in 2008 to the final book, Seal of the Worm, in 2014. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist.

Tchaikovsky's novel Children of Time won the 30th Arthur C. Clarke Award on 24 August 2016.

Show Notes:

2:00 Octopussies or Octopi?

3:15 - Adrian's Doctorate

4:20 - Adrian's journey from University to working in blood spattered offices

9:15 - Landmark geeky influences

11:42 - The significance of role play and how it relates to insect segmentation!

15:59 - Being edited and navigating his love of words

22:42 - writing methodology - for the audience vs writing for yourself

27:24 - What scares Adrian about his own writing

29:55 - Engaging with your version of the future

31:45 - Autism, Being an outcast and reactions from your 12 yr old self

33:23 - The Book that made Adrian cry

34:53 - What's next for Adrian

38:00 - My thoughts and farewell

Books written by Adrian mentioned in this episode

Walking To Aldebaran - https://amzn.to/38NPiq3

Bearhead - https://amzn.to/3tn4sfw

Doors of Eden - https://amzn.to/3zXUpA1

Children of Time - https://amzn.to/2X3o8ZW

Children of Ruin - https://amzn.to/3jQxLUK

Dogs of War - https://amzn.to/3BOXwef

The Expert Systems Brother - https://amzn.to/3nfRjnw

Shards of Earth - https://amzn.to/38PSWQp

Other books mentioned in the podcast

Becky Chambers: Wayfarers series - https://amzn.to/3nhPMgG

Wheel of Time - https://amzn.to/3he55U1

The Infinite - Patience Agbabi - https://amzn.to/3yOusla

Find Adrian:

https://shadowsoftheapt.com/

twitter - @aptshadow

facebook - https://www.facebook.com/adrian.tchaikovsky

Message The Naked Geek to share your experience or insights - david@thenakedgeek,co,uk

Continue the conversation in the Facebook Group

This podcast was produced by RogueSpirit Productions - message to see how they can help you produce your podcast - david@roguespirit.co.uk

David Monteith 0:06

Welcome to the podcast where I invite you on a journey to explore meaning, vulnerability and purpose through the lens of a life lived in Geekdom. I'm David Monteith, and I am the naked geek.

Thank you very much for having me on the show. Yeah, I do. Remember, I'll say this now that I remember being at the kitschie awards with you and I was sitting next to you. And we were talking about the shadows of the app series. And I remember going, please just slow down and stop writing for a while so I can catch up. And what did you do? You went and wrote what 10 of them?

Adrian Tchaikovsky 1:47

Well, if I was the Kitchies, that must have been towards the end of the series, I think,

David Monteith 1:51

yeah. But he didn't stop writing or slow down. So thank you very much for that. Also, the other thing that I wanted to put on you and just to kind of guilt trip you about was I was in hospital with COVID recently, and for some reason I decided to raise children and ruin

the children of time. And my brain was a particularly it was in a particularly malleable phase at the time. They were they're intelligent octopus octopuses octopy I can't

Adrian Tchaikovsky 2:22

Oh, go well, I go through I go. I use all three in the book from different characters. By the way, let me get this straight octopuses is correct. Octopodes is correct. Kind of sounds weirdly up itself. octopy is incorrect, but it's also the nicest sounding one. Yeah, yeah.

David Monteith 2:41

Things I, you know, I've built tentacles and suckers in general, freak me out. And yet, while reading this book, The thought of swimming with octopy, embedded itself in my head in such a way that when I went to the swimming pool with my kids, I was like, Where are the octopuses?

Adrian Tchaikovsky 3:11

Not sorry.

David Monteith 3:15

we say no more. All right, my first question to you has, is the purpose of nothing really, it's just so you got an honorary doctorate? Yes. What does that mean? I mean, does that mean you can actually be called Dr. Tchaikovsky, or does it not work like that?

Adrian Tchaikovsky 3:31

It does. I mean, it's not some I kind of feel. So when this came through my wife

was in the last year of her actual academic doctorate in music psychology, and was just on the point of submitting her thesis. And then Lincoln University got haldeman's, hey, we'd like to offer you an honorary doctorate and she nearly killed me

David Monteith 3:56

for years.

So I I'm kind of not allowed to call myself, Dr. Tchaikovsky, because she she is Dr. Tchaikovsky, and she has earned it and I kind of feel well, it is it is a marvelous honor and I am genuinely truly grateful. But at the same time, I also I have not done the work that a doctorate entails. And I'm not really a doctor in that sense.

That's made my day.

loved to have been a fly on the wall when that news came through in the house . And also why I mean, I studied applied biology and I wanted to be an actor What made you cuz you're really qualified, legal exec. If I'm,

Adrian Tchaikovsky 4:33

yeah, yeah.

David Monteith 4:34

Why? Why?

Adrian Tchaikovsky 4:35

Oh, God. Well, I mean, honestly, the it makes sense if you work from the principle that the only thing I've ever wanted to be as a writer, and everything else has kind of been secondary to that. So yeah, I studied psychology and zoology at university I almost the I came out of both subjects somewhat disillusioned.

David Monteith 4:59

From don't come from my university studies, the subjects I chose to study at university come from the place I was already in luck would lead to that, that writing.

Do you consider that a waste of time then? Or have you taken important things from it?

Adrian Tchaikovsky 5:14

Um, I University was not a waste of time at all. Yeah, I mean, one of the things University did was it actually polished me into a functioning human being

David Monteith 5:34

They basically allowed me to grow as a person and become someone who was, you know, even halfway functional in functional in society. And I made a lot of friends university, I had a lot of great experiences. And I still came out of it with a degree, not a terribly good degree, but a degree nonetheless. But at the end, I basically found that the subjects I have chosen to take one not, didn't do what I thought they were going to do, I guess, is the thing. I mean, as you know, I'm someone who has a particular fondness for insects and the ones zooology lecture I got into

that was to do with insects basically started out and here is how we kill insect agriculture. This is not what I want to learn. And the one I got into about animal behavior was very heavily weighted towards a chap called Skinner who was basically animals are robots, they don't think they don't feel you can kind of experiment on them dance content, it doesn't matter. None of which really jive terribly well with the way I see the world.

completely out of order stacks of paper from abbatoirs. And trying to match up with farmers claims and a lot of these pieces of paper. Were still spattered with dry.

Wow. scintillating,

Adrian Tchaikovsky 7:39

dried infected blood.

David Monteith 7:41

Wow.

Adrian Tchaikovsky 7:42

So fun. So two weeks. And then the legal aid board was hiring because they had a massive backlog of paperwork, paperwork, they needed to sort out before they changed the computer system. And that kind of turned me on to the legal profession. And because there was nowhere to go from base level of legal aid, but ended up getting a job with a legal secretary purely because my writing meant I had the typing speed. My whole thing was just this weird cascade of coincidences. And then the legal executive stuff came because I could learn on the job and train while doing the secondaries work.

David Monteith 8:10

Right! What, a journey

Adrian Tchaikovsky 8:14

which you're, I'm guessing you're, you're happy to be out of?

Well, no, I mean, I mean, honestly, I've worked with three different firms as a legal executive, and I've really enjoyed, at least they're the people and the actual experience to have those firms. But the actual work was stressful. And

Unknown Speaker 8:36

there were bits of it, I could do and there were bits of it, I was maybe not so good at and so on. I think my life My life is certainly felt a lot easier. Now, I'm not going into an office. And obviously, that turned out to be have a variety of fringe benefits over the last year or so.

David Monteith 8:50

Yes, just a little. And no spattered blood, though. So that's, that's a positive, less, less, less better. By the end, working from home tends to Well, you've got a child. So

Unknown Speaker 9:15

And I think what the naked geek is all about is kind of exposing the way that the things that we love have helped us develop in that way. So but we'll come to that. So just want to go way back. So as a kid, you recall when you first read or watched or heard something from the genre, whatever it may be, that kind of captured your imagination or, or was your gateway experience into into the form.

Adrian Tchaikovsky 9:38

So I think the first thing that I recall being very fannish about at an incredibly early age was must have been the Christopher Reeve Superman, right? Because I can write I got my mother to make me like a red Superman cloak with one of those stickers you got on the back that always kind of die in the wash almost immediately.

And then Star Wars was then the big thing growing up, weirdly enough, I did not get to see Star Wars until after Empire came out because I was Lincolnshire and no damn place, which was was showing it. So I read the, like the tie in novels and comics and everything you can get hold of and considered myself insanely knowledgeable about Star Wars without ever having seen the film. Do you recall the emotions that went with seeing Superman and Star Wars for the first time? Um, honestly, what I'm most you recall is kind of making up my own stories related stuff with action figures and things like that, because that's that's tended to over overwrite my initial kind of contact with the original stuff. Because I mean, I've always been someone who's sort of constantly confabulating in that kind of way. And so

the whole Star Wars thing for me became very much about a lot of the peripheral characters and the alien robot and things like that. And I could kind of take all leave Luke and Han. So

I love that. Do you think I mean, do you think that's that desire to do that is formed the core of who you are? Now? Does it go that far back?

I think it probably does. I mean, it's, I mean, there's a big jump at around the age of 70 more actually start writing it as pros. For then I'm kind of, I ran a lot of role playing game campaigns. And before then, just as, as a, as a kid, it was very much all about imaginative play. And just you're creating value, but also very much going off the beaten track making my own stories, rather than just replicating the stories that

a particular property gave me.

Yeah, I think there's something key about that I was, I was very standard in my, in my playing, I was just, you know, mimicking what I saw. But I think that that ability to go outside of that is quite interesting. And probably something that hadn't occurred to me as a kid that I could make it my own. So did role play. When do you discovered role playing? Was that like something extraordinary? I mean, how old are you when that happened? And is that an extraordinary progression? For you?

Yeah, I mean, I must have been about 13. When that kicked off, I mean, it was it was it was the thing that certainly swept through my score, there were quite a lot of people who were in it into it very briefly. But it became one of my main mainstays, but they're not. And it also, frankly, became one of my ways for making friends. Because historically, I've, generally, I've had a small number of friends that I'm, I've been very, very close with, I mean, most of my, there are still three people from my secondary school that I'm still in contact with, and still game with, for example. And so yeah, it basically very much became it became a big part of my kind of mental landscape. And I think partly that was because, well, because it was very much aimed for in catering for somebody exactly in my kind of position. But also, it gave you that opportunity. It gave you a just enough structure to build on and just a freedom to do what you wanted.

But do you think that I mean, before that came along? Were you very much in your own in your own heads? or?

Yeah, but I mean, I think that I guess the big thing with role playing is, it's a social activity that you kind of, you know, obviously fighting fantasy books and so forth aside, you kind of need

a group of people to get the most out of it. And there are kind of such things as solo roping experiences, but they're very much not the same. from, from my perspective, so I think that's a big leap from just kind of inventing stories in your head, or even just playing. You know, as a child, you play imaginative games with other children, you make the rules up as you go along, and you throw it all together, and then it all kind of is gone. And you don't generally repeat the same thing again, or build on it, they will get there very fleeting instances of old building. And this is, this is one of the things that caught I don't know how I would it be if there would be nothing like Minecraft when I was a kid, because obviously that is that is a persistent creative endeavor that, that much younger children get involved in these days. But the thing with because of its social aspect, and also purely because it has that scaffolding there in this in the rules and the dice, and the kind of given axioms of the world that any any particular game has given you. I think it it. Well, there's so by biological analogy, insect analogy, even, so segmentation - there's a there's a theory that, you know, insects are built on segments. And each segment kind of repeats the previous, you have the same elements, and each segment, you've got legs and breeding bits and so forth. And there's a theory that the genetic development of this segmentation was a colossal revolution in, in life on Earth, because it means you effectively have that shorthand. It's a bit like when you've got a computer program saying 20 go to 10, which means you're not writing out everything out everything longhand. You can just say Do it again. Do it again.

Do it again. And it suddenly means you have a basic structure that you can build all this other weird, wonderful stuff on. And in the way that rules systems have a role playing game is something that can absolutely turbo charge, basic imaginative play and imagination into something much bigger because you brought all that stuff to help you climb up, because it's doing so much of that work for you, rather than you having to reinvent it a fresh every time.

I mean, so you're saying that something incredibly important in your development?

Yeah, I generally, I mean, I think I mean, I there are several specific sort of writing skills, but I can absolutely say have come from playing a lot of role playing games. I mean, it's it's an but aside from that, just purely the fact that it is an imaginative exercise. But it's also an exercise where you're having to take into account the wishes feelings of other people, because one of the big things as a writer is not just inventing the story is the fact that you've got to communicate that story to other people and know how that story is going to land with a with a readership that you don't have control over.

Well, interestingly, do you find that having an editor, how has the experience of being edited changed for you from your first book to your last book?

Well, My first editor was a chap called Peter Lavery, who I've always felt was very much one of the very, very last of the old school editors in the business. He was very much the sort of editor that when you went down to see your agency, the publishers, you would get together with Peter Lavery and you and your agent, and he and his assistant would end up in a pub garden somewhere with eight bottles of wine empty under the table,

higher afternoon and some of the evening gone, which is the thing you read about a lot in kind of publishing tales of your but doesn't tend to happen these days. Yeah, he was he was one of the last of the old school in that respect. But also, he was one of the last of the old school in that he edited with a capital E, I would get from him an entire printed out manuscript with pencil annotations, every single line of suggestions and changes and amendments. Wow. And one of the problems I had getting going in other writer was, I'm from a particular generation of schoolchildren who were not taught who were not taught any of the nuts and bolts of how the language works. You may be learned it as in a foreign language, you might have learned French grammar, you didn't learn English grammar. And so most of what I should have known already, I picked up from Peter Lavery teaching me how to write, right. But he was very much one of the last, last people who were working at that level. And now obviously, first of all, it's all done online. Obviously, you have and frankly, I'm not sure I'd now want to go back to that pencil editing thing, because my

better for your liver.

that as well, I guess. But it's, you know, dealing with an annotated manuscript in Word is a lot easier to zip through. But I absolutely needed that level of attention at the time I first came into the business now

did you get you find yourself getting defensive?

Always. And it's something thankfully, by then I kind of got to the point where I was able to, to, to kind of give myself a bit of a talking to and say, Well, look, this is these people know what they're doing. And, yeah, by all means, if you think there's a thing that you don't have to do, they all they generally tell you, these are all only suggestions. But even if you know if something's flagged up, and you think well, they obviously haven't understood what I've written, if they're making that amendment, the the knock on areas will obviously haven't communicated it very well. And maybe I need another way to say what I want to say if it's not coming across. So I mean, I do get defensive, it's one of the big, it's, I suspect, most authors are very protective about what they've written at the start. And you get to the point where, actually, you frankly, you never quite get out of that mindset, you just need some you've got to keep whipping back, because you're not always the best arbiter during work. I mean, I still rely heavily on on editors. And although it tends to be it doesn't tend to be quite such detail work. Now, there's still quite a lot of points in time where I'll give a suggestion through and I'll immediately have this kicked back up. No, no, it's perfect. It's fine, it's golden. And then you've got to take a step back and then we'll actually have a look at it at least have a look and have a read through and think well you know, do you know Do you want to die on this hill as it were? Do you want to think of a different way of saying it or do you want to just take this takes the suggestion as proffered and it's it's all very case by it often gets very case by case

Do your editors and I'm just looking now I'm looking at children of time I'm looking at the tiger in the wolf, I'm looking at guns of dawn and myself. Do you ever get your editors going, :Oh, for God's sake, Adrian just write something shorter"?

Well, I mean, shards of Earth, which is has just come out last bow 10,000 words.

Wow,

I do still right over right over long. And one of the things I still do and I need to be brought up on is I will insert lots of fun world building stuff, which I find absolutely fascinating, which slows me the pace of the book down to a crawl. Because I want to explain how very clever I've been in this universe. And that sort of thing has to go. And that's, that's a big chunk of the book. And, yeah, that's a big chunk of the cuts that tend to happen. But it is a thing that I don't seem to be able to stop myself doing it the thing that I rely on editors to bring me up on, I find that I have a Nick's, there are times where I there are passages in lots of people's books where I find my eyes skimming over certain descriptions. And yet, I wouldn't have it any other way. Because I love the the invented science behind it. And I want to know what it is. And I find it even if my eyes do tend to skip over it, I like to have the option to go back and read that and understand it further, which is a weird conundrum. Also, there are no hard and fast rules, I mean, people that there are a whole that a whole set of writing advice, Maxim's things like show don't tell and stuff like that. And then none of them uniformly true. They're always a thing, there's, you know, maybe you want to keep in mind that you don't want to overdo this or that. But sometimes you do want to show sometimes you do want to do the other things that people say never do, because the book is right for him. And one of the things with children time, one of the reasons I kind of thought it was going to die on it's ass, frankly, was that there's a lot of wool, it was a pump to remember at the time, I was basically midlist Fantasy author, hmm, with this idea, - I want to write this science fiction book about spiders, and

I can see how that would not really, that doesn't really work on paper,

they were very iffy about it. It was not a book, you know, it, it ended up with quite a quite a, you know, an extremely small advance compared to the fantasy books. It was, I think, a bit of a pump, because I was doing well enough that they wanted to keep me happy or something like that. But it's got a lot of exposition on it, it's got a lot of me basically talking to the reader about how the biology in the spiders works. Because you kind of have to do it. There's no way in the narrative that you can, you can't have one spider talking to another saying, Well, as you know, Bob, this is how our bodies function. So that's the idea of a spider called Bob. Yeah, I mean, sometimes you've got a, you just got to bite the bullet. And I kind of imagined it a bit like a David Attenborough documentary. But it's all done in that. And this is the whole all the spider bits are written in the present tense. Because that's how David Attenborough narrates things. So yeah, this, this animal is doing this now. And now he is doing this. And that was the the kind of the form I was going for. But it's just got a it's got a lot of me talking about evolution in biology. And it was it seems to work the books, the books has done well enough that I think I can say, fairly solidly, that it works really well. But it's also absolutely the way that some people will tell you not to write a book,

Now I mean, there was a sentence there that my ears pricked up at which was you know, it has to be you, and it has to be me. And would that be key advice you'd give to any writer? I mean, is there the temptation to write for the audience rather than write for yourself? What's the right? Is there a right way round?

I think, I mean, this is into me, I'm probably about to do a bit of awfully heresy here. I mean, I think a lot of a lot of people's advice seems to be what you write for yourself. And if you write yourself in with for the truest kind of noblest way, then then your purpose will shine through and your readership will instantly get what you're saying. I kind of think that's probably not the case. And I think that if I was writing purely for myself, I'll be writing books that no one in their right mind would want to read. I think that having an awareness of what your audience will expect from any given book, from any given sub genre or book is very important. And I think that, you know, if only because you plan to subverted It doesn't mean you actually have to give them what they expect. But I think you have to know what they're doing. That is that is a big thing. And it's it's it's underrated, as a writing tool. And I think it's, it's also very hard. But I mean, Lord knows one thing I am is a reader. So if nothing else I can at least know I know what I react to as a reader. So I'm at least, you know, I'm writing for at least a narrow class of reader that reads books in the way that I read books and the looks of things, you know, that enjoys the things that I enjoy. And so I'm always writing a book that I know, I would like one to read if someone else had read it. Yeah. And I think writing I mean, there's always going to be there's always going to be a readership for anything, but I think having an idea of that idea of contract between the reader and the writer and I think it's, it's, it's something that can be taken taken to unwise extremes perhaps, but if the idea, there is something, you there are questions that you need to answer, that your readers will be unsatisfied. If you don't answer there are. There are places you know, it's a bit like if you have a character that's very important to them, they just wander off halfway through the book and never come back. And you just don't mention them. It's unsatisfying. If you're doing it, because that's your specific point and is meant to be unsatisfying, then that's fine if you're doing it because You just run out of things to do in the plot, maybe you need to rework the plot to give them a better end or give them a function later on or something like that. There are lots of things like that, which I suspect most authors kind of work do fairly instinctively, that give a book its shape, and its structure and work for an audience. And I know certainly I've read books, which haven't landed on that structural point. For example, if you have a book that's part of a large series, and but the individual book doesn't have a structure of its own, it's simply a chunk of sausage, so to speak, rather than an individual thing with its own shape. I find that as a reader very unsatisfying, because you you feel your body will pay off at finishing 350 pages of book,

I remember that with very much with Robert Jordan Wheel of Time. stuff, there was about six books in the middle, that I felt they were just part of the sausage factory. Yeah,

I mean, I think I think epic fantasy is quite prone to it as a as a big, certainly on epic fantasy of a particular period, when basically publishers assumed like, This series is working, just keep writing books, please keep going. And I think that you get the authors who are in a bit of a trap at that point. So what I've got to keep writing that book, I want to do something else, my heart's not in it. But this is where the mortgage is being paid from. So I will keep turning out, basically. I mean, there was my my, my agent recalls a I think it was an Amazon review on that particular series where somebody said, I feel like a hamster in the Wheel of Time. I mean, I should say, I have not read. I have not read Robert Jordan at all. So I have no direct comment on that. But I know I have read other other fantasy series of that era. I think there absolutely. Was this kind of treadmill airfloss going on and publishing as this is working. Keep doing it.

Well, why not? I mean, you see, the same thing with a lot of TV shows really don't like that really doesn't need to be 22 episodes long.

Jordan is insanely popular. It obviously landed for an awful lot of people. It's a bit like, I mean, there are there are very, most genres have at least some corner were repeating the familiar is exactly what people want as readers. That is what they go there for. And this is what I mean about being, knowing what your readership wants, if that is what your readership wants, and that's kind of you know, if you don't give them that, then you have to at least understand that they might be a bit miffed, and they're not getting it.

Well, let me let me ask you this in terms of, well, in terms of the themes you may explore, that may be in your own head, just I was reading the premise of long walk, did I say that? Right? How do you walk into Aldebaran walking around, and it was the and I looked at it, it totally set in a mild panic. I mean, not really a mild panic, but I could feel that kind of there was a little fear in there. I was trying to what is that about? And I it was this fear of being lost, I suddenly thought and not just, you know, not just physically but being lost sort of mentally in your world and where you're going. And I thought I kind of have to read that because I don't know why I'm attracted to something which kind of gives me an instinctive fear. Have you ever written something that kind of freaks you out a little bit? Or?

Um, since because I've made a lot of the stuff? I I'm aware, I'm kind of I often write about things that freak a lot of people out that do not in any way, impact on me in the same way. I mean, yeah, with spiders being very much the poster child for that, but a lot of other stuff. And again, it's to do with you that it will be an expectation, if you know, it's going to freak people out. You can have a lot of fun with it. Well Children of Ruin ruined you absolutely.

Yes yes I know, yes I know. Yes, I know that quite definitively.

I mean, I think the things, the things that scare me, the thing that freaked me out that I work that I write about are human things I love and really enjoy writing about the alien and the uncanny. And the other the things that I really I'm really scared about are they turned up in books like Doors of Eden and Bear head and they're to do with what people do to people and what people do is not what the other does to us is what we do to the other.

Yeah, I saw that a lot in dogs of war. Yeah. And, and the, you know, the rights that we assume we have to do those things to people. Yes,

yes. It's you know, it's basically at the end of the end of the day. We're not you can have as many little invasions and Little Green Men sort of stories and Independence Day stories and so forth. But at the end of the day, the our big enemy is us. You know, it's not aliens. It's not It's not even as it turned out, kind of like a random asteroid from space. We're going to kill us. We are we are the problem that we need to deal with.

What I what I found, slight departure, what I found fascinating and a lot of authors have been doing it and I think it's kind of impossible not to do it in as you kind of as you kind of future proof the future, if you like is so many characters have got implants, you know, they can look up things just with a thought and so on at this, I mean, assuming we had the technology, would you be in line to have that ability implanted in you? Or is that something he would like - "Hell No"?

I mean this I mean, I guess I would say yes, but at the same time, I'm aware that as I've got older, my Luddite tendencies have got more and more, which is more and more just maybe find God, I have to learn another piece of conferencing software, and I never delete it. It's one of the one of the things you see in the future is it always works one way, whenever people have things like implants and so forth. In science fiction, there is one type of implant, everyone has it, it all works the same way. It's this unified, global wonderful thing we're all plugged in, it's terribly convenient. What you don't get inside speakers yet, there are 19 different types of thing. None of them talk to each other properly. It's all insanely difficult. Everyone uses a different one. So if you want to talk to this person, you have to get their thing, and then it clashes with your thing. And I don't know. Um, so yeah, implant. And in theory, it just does seem to be one of the absolute Givens of any kind of technologically utopic science fiction thing is everyone, you have an implant, it's basically it's like everyone has a mobile phone, except you don't physically have to get it out of your pocket. It just links to your brain and does things. But I'm kind of similar to it's not even knowing that it might fry my brain. It's just having to learn the operating system. The thought feels exhausting exhausting. Yeah,

I got a couple more questions for you. If you're if your 12 year old self could peek into the future, is there a particular work of yours You think he would be most wowed by?

That's interesting. I mean, I've actually tried my son, my son is 13. And I've tried him on a few of mine. And what was the one that really landed was the novella, the expert systems, brother. Oh, okay. He's not terribly well known in the UK, it's was out from the US publisher tour, and you can only really get it if you really hunt. Or if you go to a Forbidden Planet in London, they usually have a few. But that that clicked with him really well, I think, one of the I mean, my son is autistic. And the book is very much about someone who gets cut off from his society at a very basic level, to the extent that he's he, he, he effectively has great pride, I'll just say without spoiling the blog, but he effectively he, he became, he ceases to be recognized by them as one of them socially. And so he becomes this automatic outcast, who has to find his own way, in his own way in the world, completely outside society on this sort of alien alien world. But it has, it's not entirely a bad thing and has other advantages. And he's that particularly resonated with him, I think, and I suspect, I mean, when I was, frankly, when I was a kid at school, they weren't testing for autism, but I suspect I would probably have been on the spectrum, had they done so at the time, and I think this is probably the one that would have clicked with me as well.

Amazing. Thank you. That, you know, just looking at those things, which do help us along, I think the last couple of years have been particularly rough on most of us. Is there anything you've read that you would recommend in the last few years, which you just found, you know, that's, that's helped me get through the last few years? That was fun to read. That was fascinating. What can I read to get me through this last leg of COVID?

Oh, well,I mean, I'm gonna say the the the stuff the most, the science fiction that I find is most kind of uplifting is definitely Becky Chambers. All of her wayfarers series, I got I read the most recent one. A few months ago, I think, and it's all extremely good. But it's also it's very, very positive in a way that very little scientific gene is it's not as you know, it's talking about ordinary people in a of varying species, making their lives in, in the future in space. And you know, they have problems, but they're very much ordinary people problems, and they tend to come together to solve them. There's often a big sense of community, and bridging interspecies gaps and things like that, and I absolutely love them.

Yeah, absoloutely I've only read the first one. And it was Yeah, I completely agree. Did I get this thing I've read? I read one and I've enjoyed it so much. I get scared to read the second one, in case it doesn't...

I will say the I think the second one is my favorite of that series. And it made me cry.

Ah, good to know. Good to know. Right? I'll put a link to that in the show notes. closed and common orbit, I think right? Okay, good. So now I'll go straight on the list. Finally, what's coming up for you in terms of writing? Are there any concepts you haven't played with yet that you want to? Oh, always plenty. loads and loads.

I've got it. I mean, I'm currently collecting on. I'm working quite a way ahead in the form of stuff. I'm kind of signing the contract on. So I'm collecting ideas. So I mean, you mentioned walking to walk and rollover that set of novellas for rebellion, which is six novellas is now done. And it's effectively it's two sets of three. So walk into all the brands and the time travel novella one day, all this will be yours, and an upcoming novel, which might turn out to be called and put away childish things. Those are all three of those are about that concept of get it being lost and alone in a strange and uncanny place, or poor time or just somewhere that people are not really meant to be. And the other three, which is what ironclads, firewalkers. And then down coming ogres is a basically, it's a trio of increasingly unpleasant and weird dystopias, and sort of bad futures. But they weren't more. We're looking at more novellas for Amazon collecting developer ideas now, and they're stacking up quite nicely . I'm finishing off the architect series that started with Shards of Earth. Literally, this morning, I wrote the big climactic scene for the last book that afterwards, I'm hopefully gonna go and get get to live in fantasy again, which I've not done for quite a long time. So yeah, no, it's, that will be very nice change of pace, and the chance to stretch myself in a bit of a bit of a different direction.

So you're still not, you know, taking any heed of what I've asked, and just slowing down a bit so I can catch up, you know, no,

I mean, I kind of figured at some point, I'll die. At that point, the writing will probably sort of eventually slow down, but Fine, I'll just look forward to unless I can get myself uploaded into a computer. Which point? Who knows? Oh, dear lord. Well, thanks.

Thanks. Thanks for that vision of the future there with Adrian Tchaikovsky living forever and never stopping writing. Will I ever catch up? But this is the question that I longed to find out the answer to. But thank you, Adrian, for your time, it was absolutely fantastic. And for sharing with us the things you've done. And yeah, there's always an agent czajkowski book on my to read list, and it just keeps growing. Yeah, I also one of the things I really love from your blog, and you can find agents blog at shadows of the app.com. And I'll put a link in the show notes is when you take your own books, and you do a movie casting for a preferred thing. That's fantastic. And I love the choices you come up with a brilliant. So once again, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much for having me on.

Now, I really enjoyed chatting with Adrian and getting an overview of and an insight into the process that has taken him from child to adult writer of the influences expected or unexpected that have shaped him and his work. However, there was one thing I took away from this chat that I wasn't expecting to and I didn't really see coming. It was when he was talking about his book, The expert systems brother, and the fact that this was the book his autistic son connected to the most, as with Adrian's own 12 year old self, who may have registered on the spectrum. If they did testing back then. It occurs to me now, as I'm reflecting on our chat that I'm asking something with this podcast, I'm asking for vulnerability and openness, without taking the time to think about what that might mean for someone who's not neurotypical. and by extension, what does that mean for the way I interact in general? What does that mean for my understanding of human nature and the way I interact with those around me without giving a second thought? Interestingly, I've recently quite recently bought a sci fi book for my daughter called The Infinite by Patients Agbabi, whose hero is a 12 year old autistic girl. So it's good to see a non neurotypical representation out there. And I'm looking forward to reading it myself. But like I said, I've been left with much to think about, and I guess I Adrian, thanks for inadvertently given me much food for thought. So thank you for listening. So thank you for listening to the naked geek once again. Hope you enjoyed it and check out some of Adrian's work. It's well worth the time. And once again, I'm going to ask you one favor. If you enjoyed the show. Tell a friend. Till the next time I'm David Monteith,I'm The Naked Geek

Transcribed by https://otter.ai