What draws you to write science fiction?
Honestly, SF and fantasy have a potential for free creation that other genres simply don’t. My interest is very much in the “what if,” and the worldbuilding of writing and my plots and characters emerge out of the particular questions I’m asking about the world/universe I’m writing in. With those as priorities it really *needs* to be SFF.
What themes/messages/worlds do you enjoy exploring in your work?
Evolution, non-human intelligence – animal and alien, empathy with the other, plus extrapolation of modern social elements such as inequality, prejudice and greed. Also, because I’m very fond of them, arthropods turn up with distressing frequency in most of my work. I tend to write about the natural world a lot, with an eye on evolution, ecology, interdependence and other big bio-themes.
Please tell us about Children of Memory and any other upcoming work you'd like to share about.
Children of Memory is a very hard book to talk about, as it’s book 3 of a sequence, and it’s also a bit of a mystery book. It follows a very unusual member of the pan-species spacefaring culture assembled in the previous books, and it also follows the development of a human colony on a barely terraformed planet where something very weird is going on. And there are intelligent corvids – the focus isn’t on them to the same extent as the spiders in the first book, but they have a major part to play. I also have my first fantasy novel for years coming out this December, City of Last Chances. This is kind of a fantasy Les Misérables meets Casablanca, where you have a big occupied magical city, and the various characters are desperately trying not to get caught up in the rebellion that’s brewing because it’s dangerous and they don’t want to be fantasy heroes. It’s a book about faith, oppression, factionalism and just what cause people are willing to go to the wall for. And someone gets fed to a giant centipede.
Where can we find out more about your work?
I try to keep my website at adriantchaikovsky.com up to date, and right now it’s hard to say what else is going to be a useful lasting forum.