Over the months ahead, we will introduce you to each author contributing to our cross-genre anthology, Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers. Today, we are excited to feature Adrian Tchaikovsky! We are also proud to call Adrian our friend.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is an Arthur C. Clarke, BSFA, Sidewise, and British Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy author. He is 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 Elder Race, Doors of Eden, Spiderlight and many others. Overall he has over 50 novels and novellas in print as well as a variety of short fiction.
He has won the British Science Fiction award three times (Shards of Earth, Children of Ruin, City of Last Chances), as well as the Sidewise Award (Doors of Eden), the British Fantasy Award (The Tiger and the Wolf) and the Arthur C Clarke award (Children of Time). His work has also been shortlisted for the Locus and Hugo awards.
Whilst now a full-time writer he has previously worked in law, specifically as what he terms an ‘evil lawyer’, focusing on debt and landlord/tenant disputes. He does not miss the work.
Adrian lives in Leeds, and has previously lived and worked in Reading, and in Lincolnshire. Mostly, though, he lives in the interior of his own head.
He is noted for a love of insects, spiders, invertebrates as a whole and, in general, any kind of critter that most people don’t like. His work is full of these kinds of beasties, and back in school his teachers told him that if he didn’t stop including spiders in everything then he’d get nowhere in life. A prediction that has spectacularly backfired.
Adrian’s writing originated from his love of tabletop role-playing games, a hobby he still keeps up. He claims the world- and character-building skills involved in running games transfer readily to prose. He continues to play and gamesmaster RPGs, as well as play board games and computer games. Previously he has been a keen LARPer, amateur actor and has written short plays for the stage, and has trained in historical sword techniques and stage fighting. At University he studied Zoology/Psychology which honestly didn’t inform his work as much as you’d think. He has a keen amateur interest in nature, biological sciences and evolution, especially speculative evolution.
Welcome, Adrian! We are so delighted to have your new short story, within the City of Last Chances setting, in our constellation of tales.
Learn more about Adrian Tchaikovsky from his website, and follow him on social media at BlueSky, Twitter/X, and Threads.
Photo credit: Tom Pepperdine.
Our anthology features tremendous authors across the spectrum of speculative fiction. Help us with our crowdfunding efforts to launch Of Shadows, Stars, and Sabers via Ko-fi (ongoing). We appreciate your support.