Chat #30 - Adrian Tchaikovsky
"What if there was a world where..."
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Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British science-fiction and fantasy writer known for a wide variety of work including the Children of Time, Final Architecture, Dogs of War, Tyrant Philosophers and Shadows of the Apt series, as well as standalone books such as Shroud, Alien Clay, Service Model and many others. Children of Time and its series has won the Arthur C Clarke and BSFA awards, and his other works have won the British Fantasy, British Science Fiction and Sidewise Awards.
Find Adrian at adriantchaikovsky.com
30/04/2026, 16:09 - Finbarre:
Today’s Tarot DMs chat by Finbarre Snarey is with Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Adrian is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary science fiction and fantasy. The author of the Shadows of the Apt series, the Final Architecture trilogy, Alien Clay, Service Model, Shroud, and the celebrated Children of Time sequence, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the best science fiction novel.
His writing output can only be described as prolific.
Born in Lincolnshire, Adrian studied psychology, zoology, and ended up in law. Adrian’s fiction asks some of the biggest speculative fiction questions you can ask.
What is intelligence? What is civilization? What do humans fail to see in other forms of life?
So today, we’re going to let the Tarot open the 78 doors to Adrian’s imagination. Thank you for appearing on Tarot DMs.
30/04/2026, 16:11 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
You’re very welcome!
30/04/2026, 16:11 - Finbarre:
Now, Adrian, before we get started with the cards, I need to ask, what is your experience with tarot?
30/04/2026, 16:12 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
I’ve not really had much actual experience with tarot as it’s usually used. I’m kind of fascinated with the tarot card archetypes. I own a number of decks, mostly because I just sort of like the art. And also, bizarrely enough, it seems to be a very fashionable dice alternative for a lot of recent role-playing games. I’ve seen it used in a variety of ways in that kind of sphere.
30/04/2026, 16:14 - Finbarre:
These are the ones we’ll be spending time with today, the classic Rider Waite Smith ones from 1909 and my very favourite edition.
30/04/2026, 16:14 - Adrian Tchaikovsky: Very nice. Probably more faithful to the concept than the insect one I got a year ago :)
30/04/2026, 16:15 - Finbarre: YOU GOT AN INSECT ONE? I know what my wife is getting for Christmas this year, that sounds incredible!
30/04/2026, 16:18 - Finbarre: Speaking of archetypes before we start drawing cards out, when you’re playing an RPG - which is your goto class in Dungeons and Dragons? A warlock perhaps? Bard maybe?
30/04/2026, 16:18 - Adrian Tchaikovsky: Ranger or druid - anything that has a pet or can shapechange
30/04/2026, 16:20 - Finbarre: My daughter’s favourite play style there. Anything that involves having a honking great pet spider following you around!
Right, time for your first card. This is the Anchor card and the same one that everyone will be receiving in the month of May. You get the…
30/04/2026, 16:20 - Finbarre:
30/04/2026, 16:20 - Finbarre:
Adrian, what are your first impressions or vibes from this card?
30/04/2026, 16:21 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
That’s an interesting one. So obviously very wizardish, although I suppose given wand, that’s fairly natural. Green shoots coming from the branch, so an association with nature. But I think the big thing is the idea of the hand with the wand coming in from somewhere else. So I’m kind of seeing the smoke clouds there as a portal, I suppose.
So yeah, if you wanted to look at it in a world building perspective, I suppose that’s almost given the landscape below, maybe that’s the act of world building.
30/04/2026, 16:24 - Finbarre:
One of the things I love about tarot is hearing other people’s interpretations. And the idea of this entity reaching out from another realm is one that’s going to stay with me for that card. To me, it reminds me that out in the garden, not a couple of hours ago, I was basically painting walking sticks. My ankle took a bit of a turn, I say a bit of a turn, completely broke it in January.
So now that my foot is all fixed up, I’m trying to find a different cane or stick to go with every waistcoat I own. But anyway, the traditional meaning of this is very similar to what you’ve said. It’s the idea of a card telling you something that is animated by beginnings. It’s the start of a project or a performance or relationship, personal reinvention.
And something I love about the Ace of Wands is it’s a card about what lights you up. I picked this one because, you know, it reminds me of the fire you would have in Beltane. It is the maypole.
Okay, so from that, I would ask on the theme of spark. What is the first world building spark for you? Animal behavior, scientific ideas, political and ease, game concept, a voice, an image. Tell me about those.
30/04/2026, 16:27 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
So this is very project specific, really. The category of thing is always, what if there was a world where...
So there’s always some sort of big idea that I start with, which might, you know, what if there was a world where you had spiders evolved as the dominant species, is the obvious one for Children of Time.
Or what if the world where everyone was a shape changer for The Tiger and the Wolf, say.
It doesn’t really matter for the process what that initial idea is, because the process is then you work out from it with the logical consequences of that, on how that would change everything in the world.
I’m much more interested in a concept where that what if idea is shot through the setting as a whole, is something that touches everyone, rather than say, you know, what if there was magic, but nobody knew about it, and there was just this secret group of people who did magic.
I much more prefer, what if everyone could do a certain thing, or magic of a certain type was just freely available, and how does that change everything else?
30/04/2026, 16:31 - Finbarre:
Thinking about your world building, I’m going to use Children of Time because, well, A, it’s my second favourite science fiction book ever written, just after E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. And it involves so many different variables, so many levels of story. So you have a world which has scarcity of particular resources. You have different times, different species, different sociological constructs, different politics. And in this you have people with different jobs, different wants and loves and aspirations, fears… all of that together.
When do you know when to stop building the world and start writing?
30/04/2026, 16:33 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
I get asked this a lot, and I think it’s just a sort of gut feeling thing. There’s no hard and fast rule. Usually by the time you do get to that point, you’ve sort of over created anyway, so that there’s more groundwork you’ve done than will end up going into the book, which I think is the best way to do it.
A lot of the stuff that isn’t explicitly put in is still sort of implicit in other things you’re writing, so you’re giving yourself a bit of redundancy, a bit of expansion room, and theoretically somewhere to go with the sequel, I suppose.
But yeah, generally, I mean, the amount of work will also depend on the sort of book I’m writing. If I’m doing a very detailed kind of lots of factions and groups and sort of fantasy city thing like City of Last Chances, that has a lot of work in it because it’s involving a group of people who have been in a place for a long time, have a lot of pre-existing associations and a lot of common understandings, all of which sort of need to be inherent on the page.
Other books where it’s potentially more of a travelogue, I might do a little less for each individual area because you’ll only be passing through relatively quickly. But you get to a point where you think, right, that’s ready to go. And it’s hard to point to any particular sort of quantitative element of it that tells you that. It’s just how you feel about it. And you don’t always get it right. It’s worth knowing sometimes you have to go back and do a bit more. Sometimes you find you’ve done way more than you need.
30/04/2026, 16:36 - Finbarre:
While I was out in Beeston at the Pudding Pantry with my wife, we were trying to do the maths of how many characters you must have written about.
And considering that you have, I mean, I’ve seen guesses that you’ve written over 60 published books, probably far more than that, trying to work out how many people you have sprung into being in these worlds.
Do you keep some kind of database, spreadsheet, and keeping track of every single individual living soul must be quite the task?
Where do they all come from?
30/04/2026, 16:39 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
Ah… I mean I certainly don’t keep a a database it feels like they’re probably allowed a million in the Shadows Of The Apt of books alone these days I tend to rely very heavily on my own sort of dramatis personae for individual books so I create those as I go along and so as new characters enter the narrative I add them in and then if I am doing something in the same world at least I’ve got something easy to refer to.
I suspect that you could probably analyze my body of characters and start putting them into buckets fairly easily I know I have archetypes I tend to tend to return to and just, you know, give different spins on but you can certainly see that there are characters who are sort of related in the way that the narrative treats them and in the way that they are sort of personalities work.
I certainly know I have particular villain archetypes I tend to run through particularly down to whether i like the villain or not which tends to indicate the sort of fate they’re going to receive at the end of the book.
So yeah, I mean, I think this is one thing you get from coming from a Games Mastering sort of history and role-playing games honestly is the ability to put out an awful lot of characters and embody each one of them and give them each one sort of a personal spin. Make them all distinct but still have, quite a lot you know, quite a large number of them even in a single book and if you’ve done the world building work properly then if you need to just pull another character out… they come kind of complete with a background and a place that they fit into the world so that you’ve got a bit of a head start on presenting them.
30/04/2026, 16:42 - Finbarre:
Thank you for those, Adrian. We’ve got so many fabulous answers just from the first card alone.
And it’s time for the second one. This is the Wild card. This can be anything.
Of course, it’s not the first card you received, which was the Ace of Wands.
You won’t be receiving the last card that’s been picked for you, but it could be anything else.
I’m going to shuffle the deck, and I’d like you to either say stop or write stop, and we’ll see which card it is.
30/04/2026, 16:43 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
Stop!
30/04/2026, 16:44 - Finbarre: The suave and slightly sly
30/04/2026, 16:44 - Finbarre:
30/04/2026, 16:45 - Finbarre:
Does this card look familiar or relevant to any of your projects at the moment?
30/04/2026, 16:46 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
I guess what this looks to me is theatrical in that I guess there’s a certain amount of the outfit worn by the character being that way that what the Middle Ages didn’t look like, but is sort of represented in a certain period of photography and art and on the stage.
And the texture work on the doublet or tunic makes it look very much like sort of string chain mail, if you know what I mean, in which case it does kind of connect with Grave of Perfection, which is the fifth and last main Tyrant Philosopher’s book, which I just basically got off to the publisher.
One of the elements there is the theatre scene in occupied Ilmar and its constant battle with the centre of the Palleseen. One of the main characters is a playwright who is given a peculiar commission to fulfil. So I guess that’s what it links to my own work with.
30/04/2026, 16:50 - Finbarre:
My goodness, you’re absolutely right. There is an operatic element to this card, one that normally indicates a sharp mind and a lively conversational presence.
So, yeah, that touch of showmanship and theatricality is integral to this.
Okay, the kind of question that the Page of Swords would ask is, which of your ideas has been the most impatient to be expressed?
30/04/2026, 16:53 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
I’m going to talk about, I guess, about a project that is currently not even being teased.
Normally, when I’m writing these days, I’m writing to contract in that, so Pan Macmillan will say, you know, we’ll have a contract which is this many books, and then that will kind of go onto the docket, and I’ll work through them, usually to get out one a year. And I’m currently working with sufficient different publishers that their various requirements pretty much fill my time.
Last year, there was a novella idea I came up with that I saw, all right, that’s really nice, that’s really good. I’m going to just write that completely off the bat, and then see if I can place it with somewhere, which, you know, we’re currently in negotiations. And it was my wife, who is a musician, a singer, has been asking me for a while to do a fantasy book about where the magic is also music, which is something that various writers have visited from time to time.
That kicked around in my head for quite a while without, and I had a number of false starts without really finding where I wanted to take it. And then I had a series of just ideas one after another that I jotted down in my ideas folder. And then within about a month, I was writing the novella, because it was just very, it felt very different. And it also felt as though it belonged in a kind of a part of the fantasy landscape I hadn’t particularly written, written before. Yeah, no, just fun to do. And I’ve got to say, it is sometimes just fun to strike out and get away from the things that you have been obsessing over and just do something completely fresh.
30/04/2026, 16:56 - Finbarre:
Adrian, I could hear the smile in your voice as you described that project. Out of interest, how many hours in the day do you devote to writing?
30/04/2026, 16:57 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
It tends to vary. I’m usually writing for a chunk of them each morning. I tend to write to the beat, which is either to a chapter end or to some significant point within the chapter. I guess, say, two to three hours of actual writing, and then obviously whatever else is on the slab for editing and admin and so forth in the afternoon.
30/04/2026, 17:01 - Finbarre:
We have hopped from the Ace of Wands, we have skipped from the Page of Swords, and now we’re going to jump into the Gift card.
Now, Adrian, this has been picked for you by Elspeth Wilson, who was the author of These Mortal Bodies, and she had a particular card that she wanted to give you.
30/04/2026, 17:01 - Finbarre:
We like The Moon!
30/04/2026, 17:03 - Finbarre:
Now, Adrian, if you’re old enough to remember Defenders of the Earth, this one would be Mandrake the Magician, the Master of Illusion. It’s that card of, you know, the Freudian subconscious. It’s instinct, dreams, unseen forces. And it’s a card that often says that you could be mislead by appearances. It doesn’t give straight answers. It’s a card that tells you to move carefully and to allow whatever it is to become visible over time.
So, Adrian, my last question to you is about your alien worlds that are often dark, uncertain, certainly not comfortably knowable. How do you decide what should remain mysterious to the reader?
30/04/2026, 17:07 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
Firstly, I should say thank you for the card with the lobster on it, which obviously feels like it’s on brand! Yeah, mystery and information. This is honestly one of the, I mean, I think it’s one of the biggest parts of writing long form narrative fiction, especially.
But in genre fiction in particular, in horror, sci-fi, fantasy, where you are frequently dealing with people encountering the unknown, at what point and to what extent do you explain what’s going on? It does vary from book to book. Again, there are certainly books I’m very comfortable not explaining things. And there are other books where in order for the book to have an impact, you kind of do need to explain in some considerable detail how everything works and what’s going on.
Because the point of the book is that you’re writing about a thing that could conceivably be real. And this is the Children Of Time category. If it had been just like magic hand wavy talking spiders, it wouldn’t have had the same resonance with readers, I think, as it has with me walking you through the science of it. And so, yeah, there is no mystery in why the spiders are there and how they are. Whereas if I’m writing in a more fantastical mode, or when I’m writing, say, with Alien Clay, there’s a lot of alien stuff.
The world of Alien Clay, which is not explicitly understood because the characters never discover it and it’s a first-person narrative. And that’s kind of exactly what that book needs. So you set the slider, really, on a given project as to how much you are going to say.
There are benefits to explicit revelation and there are benefits to leaving people wondering. And it’s very much the recipe between those two that you’re cooking up as to precisely where the slider goes with any one book. It is genuinely quite a high-end part of the writing toolkit, deciding what you’re going to reveal. And then, of course, you need to work out, well, how are you going to reveal it? And at what point did it turn up? That feels like it is almost 40% to 50% of the art of writing a book is just governing that information.
30/04/2026, 17:11 - Finbarre: Now is your chance Adrian to pass the Guest card to the next creative on Tarot DMs. Do you have a deck to hand or a card that has been in your thoughts recently? If so share it here and I’ll be passing it on.
30/04/2026, 17:16 - Adrian Tchaikovsky:
30/04/2026, 17:16 - Adrian Tchaikovsky: There we go
30/04/2026, 17:16 - Finbarre: WOW, that’s a stunning Hermit!
30/04/2026, 17:17 - Adrian Tchaikovsky: It’s a nice set - just “the bug tarot”
30/04/2026, 17:17 - Adrian Tchaikovsky: by Selby Burke
30/04/2026, 17:17 - Finbarre: I recently saw a video of a Praying Mantis in the “come at me bro” fighting stance and it was the funniest dancing I have seen in a long time.
30/04/2026, 17:18 - Finbarre: Oh, and one last thing Adrian - my kids are heading off on a camping trip this weekend with the scouts and the toys they are taking were named after two of your characters - Paul and Salome!
30/04/2026, 17:18 - Finbarre:
30/04/2026, 17:18 - Adrian Tchaikovsky: Awesome :)
30/04/2026, 17:19 - Finbarre:
Adrian, thank you so much for joining me on this Tarot DMs chat.
Your work has given readers sentient spiders, engineered soldiers, alien ecologies, collapsing empires, bewildered machines, and some of the most compelling non-human perspectives in modern fiction.
Thank you again. This has been a remarkable tarot reading!
30/04/2026, 17:20 - Adrian Tchaikovsky: You’re very welcome!