We’re back with another special interview episode. This time, Scott talks to bestselling science fiction and fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky. In particular, they discuss how Tchaikovsky portrays a wide range of non-human characters in his work and how we might apply this to gaming.

During the course of the conversation, we go into how Tchaikovsky’s career has moved from fantasy to science fiction, what his work owes to his experience as a GM, and just how gaming has led to him narrating some of his own audiobooks. On the way, Tchaikovsky offers an impassioned defence of arthropods as protagonists, insights into how cosmic horror relates to science fiction, and his opinions about how Lovecraft had the best monsters.

Links

Things we mention in this episode include:

Books by Adrian Tchaikovsky

• Children of Time
• Cage of Souls
• Shards of Earth
• Made Things
• Walking to Aldebaran
• Dogs of War
• Spiderlight
• Bear Head
• Shadows of the Apt
• Children of Ruin
• One Day All This Will Be Yours

Other Links

• Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock
• The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
• Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith
• Viriconium by M John Harrison
• Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones
• Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)
• Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein
• The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad
• Starship Troopers (1997)
• “The Litany of Earth” by Ruthanna Emrys
• Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys
• The Laundry Files by Charles Stross

• Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith
• “The Hounds of Tindalos” by Frank Belknap Long
• At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft
• The Private Life of Elder Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Keris McDonald and Adam Gauntlett
• “The Call of Cthulhu” by HP Lovecraft
• Cosmic horror
• Nathan Ballingrud interview
• Event Horizon (199)
• Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
• Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• “Hinterlands” by William Gibson

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