1--What is the title of your latest release?
DAYS OF SHATTERED FAITH
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
How long can you stay a good person if you’re working for the bad guys. A diplomat for a colonial regime falls in love with the nation she’s supposed to be softening up.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
Most of the details grew out of previous writing in the setting – I do a lot of world-building work, especially in this series, and so the previous two books kind of created a space where I knew something interesting must be happening. Add to that some historical inspiration centered around particularly villainous British 1700s and 1800s overseas dealing and the book came together very well.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Unusually, yes, though I don’t think she’d hang out with me. I’m too downmarket and not dashing enough.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Conflicted, sardonic, romantic.
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
That the greatest love in all the world is of a man for his truly wedded centipede.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I try and get a first draft complete before editing, unless the narrative’s really going off the rails to the extent that anything I continue to write would be complete waste.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I am a simple man. I like nice ‘n’ spicy niknaks. (UK crisps, US chips). I don’t know that they count as either foodie or indulgent, but they’ll do for me.
9--Describe your writing space/office!
I like to get out of the house to write, so I migrate around various coffee places in and near Leeds. Mostly where I write is inside my head. I put the headphones on, turn up the music and everything around me is good enough to go away for the duration. But there are too many distractions at home.
10--Who is an author you admire?
Diane Wynne Jones. This is a question where the answer changes every time because there are a bunch, but a handful of Wynne Jones books (not even her better-known ones!) taught me so much about the tricks one can play with narrative. There are some absolute top-notch reversals and inversions in books like Homeward Bounders and Power of Three and I still envy her deftness in deploying them.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
Super obscure but there is a kid’s book by a German author called Paul Biegel called The Seven Times Search. It’s about a boy who can’t do maths and so gets turned tiny and thrown into the garden until he knows his seven times table. Because apparently schooling in Germany is terrifying. Anyway, he has a bunch of vaguely maths-related adventures with the insects and things in the book, and honestly, I think that book is the direct ancestor of the Shadows of the Apt series that first got me into print.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
So I had been trying to get into print for 15 years at that point – 15 years, 15 books, zero success. I was going a bit crazy, honestly. Genuinely impacting my mental health because being an author was the only thing I wanted to be (and self-publishing wasn’t a thing back then, there were only predatory vanity publishers who I very nearly fell victim to). I said give it one more go, and if I hadn’t got anywhere by age 35 I’d give it all up. Whether that would have happened, I don’t know, but an agent (still my current agent) got back to me about Empire in Black and Gold and I signed on with him 2 weeks before my 35th birthday.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
I really do read mostly in SF and fantasy. I move quite freely within those genres, but I need some element of speculative stuff going on to keep me happy. I particularly like books that push the boundaries with new ideas – new worlds, new fantastical concepts, anything I’ve not seen before.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
Tough call, but I think it’s still Arrival, for taking surely the most unfilmable damn story and actually filming it and doing an incredible job. It’s an absurdly high-concept SF film with incredible aliens and Villeneuve knocks it out of the park.
15--What is your favorite season?
(1) Autumn, because like any good British Person the summer is too hot and the winter is too cold, and Spring is too damn jolly. (2) Andor, season 1. Delete answer as appropriate.
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Clandestinely. I’m old.
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I really, really enjoyed The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohammed. It’s an absolute tour de force of a book.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
I generally go for some kind of Asian cuisine given the choice – the UK has a good variety of Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and different strains of Chinese food, especially around Leeds.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
I have something of a problem where I need hobbies that create something lasting at the end, so the work part of my head can feel mollified. Hence I sketch a lot, and I paint Warhammer miniatures (both of which get posted up on Bluesky occasionally)
20--What can readers expect from you next?
So 2024 is going to see two novels and two novellas from me (at least!). The next up is Shroud, which is a brooding hard SF survival novel about a horrible planet you don’t want to get stuck on, and two people who get stuck on it, and precisely what the things already living there think of that. Later on, there’s Bee Speaker (Dogs of War book 3), a dystopian novella, The Hungry Gods, about billionaires coming back from space to screw everything up even more, and then Lives of Bitter Rain, which is a companion piece novella to Days of Shattered Faith.
The Tyrant Philosophers #3
Welcome to Alkhalend, Jewel of the Waters, capital of Usmai, greatest of the Successor States, inheritor to the necromantic dominion that was the Moeribandi Empire and tomorrow's frontline in the Palleseen's relentless march to bring Perfection and Correctness to an imperfect world.
Loret is fresh off the boat, and just in time.
As Cohort-Invigilator of Correct Appreciation, Outreach department, she's here as aide to the Palleseen Resident, Sage-Invigilator Angilly. And Sage-Invigilator Angilly – Gil to her friends – needs a second in the spectacularly illegal, culturally offensive and diplomatically inadvisable duel she must fight at midnight.
Outreach, that part of the Pal machine that has to work within the imperfection of the rest of the world, has a lot of room for the illegal, the unconventional, the unorthodox. But just how much unorthodoxy can Gil and Loret get away with?
As a succession crisis looms, as a long-forgotten feat of necromantic engineering nears fruition, as pirate kings, lizard armies and demons gather, as old gods wane and new gods wax, sooner or later Gil and Loret will have to settle their ledger.
Just as well they are both very, very good with a blade…
Action | Military | Fantasy Epic [Head of Zeus -- an AdAstra Book, On Sale: March 4, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9781035901524 / eISBN: 9781035901517]
Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the epic science fiction blockbuster Children of Time. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a British Fantasy Society Award, and been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist.
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