My writing 100% comes out of roleplaying. I was a keen roleplayer and especially a games master way before I started writing. From that, I got a lot of kind of world creation and character creation. um sort of experience and techniques and also very much the idea that whatever i'm creating i am creating for an audience to experience
whether it's players or readers. And then at around the age kind of 16 and 17, I came across the Dragonlance Chronicles, which are someone's role-playing game turned into novels. And that was just this sort of light bulb moment of, that's a thing I could potentially do. and it took me quite a while to get to the point of being good enough to do it, to the point of writing readable prose.
Even so, that was definitely the bridge that kind of just got me from doing small-scale role-playing stuff to using the same creative skills for writing prose for a larger audience. What is up, everybody? You're listening to episode 133 of SFF Addicts. I'm your host, Adrian M. Gibson, and welcome to your weekly dive into the world of science fiction, fantasy, and writing craft.
Joining me as always is my co-host, the Chewy to my own solo, the Joker to my Commander Shepard, MJ Kuhn. How's it going, MJ? Hello, hello. I'm doing lovely. How are you? doing fantastic on this fine morning and if you want to support this fine human being mj you can buy her debut novel among thieves this is book one in the tales of tamor duology and this is book two thick-ass thieves
the green baby and the blue baby. If you want a fun-filled adventure with hatchets and heists and other H-words, it's a lovely time, and MJ's a lovely human. Perfect. Thank you. Well, and if you want to support Adrian and his Blue Baby, Mushroom Blue Baby, you can check out his debut for some Funko Punk Noir goodness. Check this one out. Which was also very kindly blurbed by our guest.
Oh, that's right. That's right on the cover. Look at that. Spoilers for who our guest is. We haven't even introduced him yet. I mean, if people click on this or listen to it, they know right away. It'll be in the title. It's not a fucking movie. As well, if you want to support the show, we have a Patreon and merch store, so check the links in the description.
support what we do here also don't forget to rate and review the podcast on your favorite podcast app and subscribe to the fanfighter youtube channel where this and every other video and now welcoming back to the podcast after a queen's age or i don't know if it's a king's age in the uk now but adrian tchaikovsky the bearded adrian to my shaved adrian the author of the children of time series which starts with this one right here
And the Shadows of the App series, which I don't have in physical, which I regret. And the Final Architecture series, which starts with Shards of Earth. The Tyrant Philos- which starts with City of Last Chances. And just a bunch more books, because this guy writes a lot. How are you doing, Adrian? I'm very well. Thank you very much for having me back on the show. An absolute pleasure.
So let's start off with an intro. I already showed off some of your books, but if you want to let listeners and viewers know a little bit more about... Yeah, I mean, honestly, beyond the books, there's not a great deal to me, really. I have written, by now, I think, a ridiculous number of books. I think I'm working on 55, including novellas. I am certainly best known for Children of Time, which is kind of giant spiders from outer space, but sort of philosophically.
But I do all manner of different sort of sci-fi and fantasy and indeed mixes of the two. My next release will be the Tyrant Philosophers fantasy book, book three, Days of Shattered Faith, which is coming out in the UK. I think around 3rd of December. Yeah. So by the time people listen to this episode, they'll be able to pick it up in the UK or order it from North America, from the UK. Yeah.
It'll be getting a US release in, I think, March-ish. I'm not quite sure why it lacks a headline. That's a shorter wait than the other books. I had to wait like six months or something for City of Last Chances and I was just real bummed out because all my UK friends already read it. Right? Like, I'm so left out. Come on, Hattazers. Give it to me now.
we don't want to wait well we always like to kind of kick things off too by unraveling the nerdy origins of our guests because we're all just fun nerds and we want to know how you became a fun nerd um so Do you remember the books, shows, movies, games, whatever it might be in those kind of early formative years that sparked your love of sci-fi and fantasy? Yes, I mean, I very much cut my teeth on Doctor Who. Suddenly the target Doctor Who novelisations were basically my early reading fan.
And there were hundreds of them and you could go along to the library every week and they would have new ones in, which was amazing. So it was that and Star Wars were my big franchises when I was growing up. Did they really release that many novelizations for Doctor Who? Oh yeah, I mean, pretty much for every single story they did, including a lot of stories that we don't have any. visual record of anymore. They always had the novelizations, pretty much the entire...
the entire run. And I, when I was, I started watching about midway through the Tom Baker run, but obviously there was a huge backlog of stuff I was never going to get to see, but they had the book. How did they deal with the fact that doctors change? Well, I mean, that's kind of coded into the lore of the series anyway, that it's the thing that happens to the character as well as just to the actor.
So did they just describe the Doctor differently or have them... Yeah, you'd get... If it was the story where you do get that changeover, you'd get that sort of... At the end, you'd get that sort of regeneration scene where... however the writer decides to describe the kind of... the fairly low-key visual effects they're using. The amazing visual effects they used back in those eras. Yeah.
So how did that influence and inspire your writing journey? And I know you're also really big into like tabletop RPGs, you know, D&D, Warhammer, which I grew up on and I love scoping out your... your warhammer uh model painting and stuff like that how did that kind of stuff like inspire your your writing journey Well, I mean, honestly, my writing 100% comes out of roleplaying. I was a keen roleplayer and especially a games master way before I started writing.
from that I got a lot of kind of world creation and character creation. sort of experience and techniques and also very much the idea that whatever I'm creating, I am creating for an audience to experience. whether it's players or readers. And then at around the age of 16 and 17, I came across the Dragonlance Chronicles, which are someone's role-playing game turned into novel. And that was just this sort of light bulb moment of, that's a thing I could potentially do.
and it took me quite a while to get to the point of being good enough to do it, to the point of writing readable prose. Even so, that was definitely the bridge that kind of just got me from doing small-scale role-playing stuff to using the same creative skills for writing prose for a larger audience. Love it. Yeah, well, how did that, so...
We've talked to several people that do this, and I mean, that take their tabletop RPGs or LARPing, even all these kinds of different kind of related fun activities. and translate that into, you know, stories and writing. What are the skills that you're using or the habits, the things that you do when you're prepping for a role-playing game that you use also in your writing now? Especially if anyone's listening that's like...
I love D&D. I want to try to translate these skills. Well, I was always very interested. I mean, I would never be running campaigns in pre-existing game worlds, so I never did like World of Great. I would always be crazy.
and if you're creating a world for a role-playing game you do it very robustly because you can't control where the characters are going to go so you get used to having an awful lot of understanding of how the world works so you can roll with whatever the players throw at you and that's enormously useful for the sort of writing techniques I use because I start with a world and then I tend to
let my plots and characters and everything else in the book just sort of arise out naturally out of the world. and the world generally takes center stage in the sort of stories I'm telling. And so having that very detailed world, much more detail than you'll necessarily get to see on the page of the book, is very, very useful for me as a writer because I feel I'm writing about a place that is as real as I can make it.
and everything fits together in that so that all the little details we can throw in the book are coming from the same. sort of single font of inspiration. Yeah, and we'll talk a little bit more about this next episode, just a teaser, get into Adrian's world creation process. But, I mean, something that I love about your work, just, you know, at the top we were talking about the variety of stuff that you've written.
But so much of it is outside of the box and very... atypical for for what we're used to in terms of like okay here we have epic fantasy very clean cut like space opera and stuff like that but I've always appreciated how strange you let your imagination get and where that leads you. So I'm kind of curious. I want to dig into your like ideation process and how that unfolds into what you decide to actually write. I mean, usually there will be a kind of a core what if.
that is related to how the world works. So there'll be something quite fundamental. Rather than having, say, a medieval looking world but also somewhere hidden in the corner there is this magic and the magic is doing things and maybe the main character is a magician but the world itself doesn't particularly reflect the fact that magic is in it. I tend to go for worlds where the basic paradigm I want to explore is very very front and center to the extent that it is
essentially mundane to the people in the world, but very fantastical to the reader. So, In the Shadows of the App, which is my early fantasy series. There is a thing called the art and the art is basically insect powers and all the different types of people have different sort of insect patrons and get different insect powers. The key thing is, you know, there are people who can fly and sting with their hands and all this manner of insect malarkey, but none of this is unusual to them.
If you can't do it that would be weird. So having a world where as well as there being actual magic which is more mysterious, the fact of this insect-ness is just that is how they live and that is how the world is. I find much more interesting than just doing the COD Middle Ages, but maybe some magic somewhere.
Yeah, well, speaking of bugs, that was something that we kind of wanted to talk about, too. Because, you know, you're big into bugs, you're into zoology, also, you know, kind of the psychology of the mind, all these really... fascinating interests that you have that show up in the books in a lot of very fascinating ways. I mean, for Bugs, I think obviously one of the main ones I think of is The Children of Time, right? But where did this fascination with nature and kind of...
how these types of different, I don't know, organisms interact with each other. How did this begin? I mean, I very much grew up on David Attenborough nature documentaries and that kind of thing. That was basically the one type of television I was allowed to stay. after my bedtime to watch and also when I was reading those Doctor Who books or whatever sort of space adventure stories I could get my hands on as I worked my way through the library.
I was never very interested in the square-jawed science fiction hero, the explorer-y spaceman who goes about being better than everyone because he's human. and implicitly a particular type of human, because those are the stories from that particular age, I was always interested in the aliens and the monsters and the robots and all of this other stuff, which to me just seemed...
absolutely inherently more interesting. I suspect a lot of this is I was a very, very weird and disaffected kid and therefore I looked for my kind of... fictional tribe in the things that other people generally didn't like. So, you know, it was insects and it was reptiles and it was aliens and it was all of this stuff spoke to me much, much more clearly than the standards.
sort of superheroics. I mean, I liked Star Wars, but my favorite part of Star Wars when I was a kid was absolutely the cantina scene with all the aliens. Yeah, and I could kind of take or leave the actual, the old Luke Skywalker-ness of it all. So I get these humans. Well, this is the thing, and obviously you go through this for a bit and you realise, oh, hold on, you can have aliens around, but the heroes are always human.
UNTIL I saw, this is also a huge, rather bizarre but enormous influence on me, I saw the Roger Corman sci-fi film Battle Beyond the Stars. which is basically the magnificent seven slash seven samurai in space. It is a remarkably good film for the sort of time and the sort of budget it had. It still holds up reasonably well, I think. But one of the things it's got is one of the hero characters is this scary-ass lizard man alien.
And they get to be a hero. And I remember watching this and it was just like, oh, you are allowed to do this. You can have your hero or one of your heroes as being this thing which would absolutely be the bad guy in any other science fiction. And again, that was another big lightbulb moment of this is allowed. You can do it. So I owe that film an enormous debt of gratitude because that film then...
There's probably a direct line between my watching that film at that sort of impressionable age and then going off to write Children of Time later. Because the idea is, yes, why not spiders as heroes? Let's do it. And not just Children of Time. I mean, so many of your books feature non-human protagonists, non-human POV characters. And I want to get your take on this, like how exploring stories through non-human perspectives maybe helps us better understand.
Well, I mean, the thing, I mean, taking Children of Time as an example, Children of Time is a book about empathy. There's nothing in the world people hate more than spiders. I wanted to write a book where people ended up... rooting for the spiders against the humans, in which I appear to have been broadly successful. But obviously it's also about the idea that it's about empathy for the other. It's about having something that is not like us.
that we are still able to come around to seeing as of equal value to us. And that's a thing that people have a great deal of difficulty doing with other people, let alone non-human things. It's something that we as a species need a great deal more of. So yes, I write about this a lot. One of the reasons you write about the other and from the point of view of the other is to expand people's perspectives and expand people's ideas of...
actually what is life, what is the world like for things that aren't me. Yeah, I mean, speaking of a direct line, reading your work was one of my big inspirations for... writing the mushroom people in mushroom blues and that kind of viewpoint of like empathizing with the other and broadening people's perspective. when it comes to things like alienation and xenophobia and just viewing
Something like spiders, because I've talked to people who are like, I hate spiders, but I still read Children of Time. I have huge recognition. My sister was like, you should read these books. They're so good. And I was like. About spiders? And then I read it, I did! And I've had people ask me, they're like, I hate mushrooms, shall I read your book? And I'm like, that's up to you, but like, you know, maybe it can make you think about mushrooms a little differently, but...
In your opinion, why does that make fantasy and sci-fi such perfect playgrounds for exploring and unfurling these thought experiments? I mean, I think if I'd written a book about giant spiders from outer space that was like a noir thriller and not a science fiction book, people would have raised an eyebrow. Or a Regency romance or something like that, which I now want to go and do. Just for the challenge. I mean, I am obviously biased.
But to my mind, fantasy and science fiction are the perfect playgrounds for basically anything, because... For two reasons, first of all...
You do not have the limitations of a book set in the real world. And you potentially have a bit more punch and impact than a book which is treating the fantastical in, say... a magical realism or a purely symbolic way because if you're writing a book where, yes, these things are actually happening to these people rather than, oh, this person is having this weird mystical experience, it's a bit more immediate. So you've got that freedom.
But the other one is basically there is nothing you can do in any other genre that you can't also do in science fiction fantasy. You can do all the things that people do in sort of... high art high literature stuff you can do you can have crime you can have romance you can have all of these things plus you can have spaceships and dragons and why wouldn't you have all of those Spoil yourselves. Amen. Right? I love it. Treat yourself. Treat yourself, fantasy authors.
To some space dragons. So I figure that there must be quite a bit of research that you've done. especially when i'm thinking children of time like about spiders and like their inner workings and just like oh shit these like these uh i think they're they're like octopi or cephalopods or something uh but like Thinking about the logistics of a fucking spaceship of like a water-based, like a liquid-based species is like, oh my god.
Yeah, well, I gotta know, when you are researching these kinds of off-the-wall topics and things for your projects, what's the most bizarre thing that you've come across? If you can remember a particularly like, what? Moment. Yeah, I mean, the water-based spaceships was a big thing because I ended up getting a chap called Nick Bradbury who designed submarines for a living.
to tell me about watership filled spaceships which should be literally the opposite of what his job is when you think about it I mean originally... Just to give an idea of just how science can limit you. Originally, I was going to do Children of Time and do the time differential between the two, the human and the spider side of it, with faster than light travel. Not fast, but near-like travel, so you get the time-stretching, that kind of thing. And it worked out that actually...
You need to be going so close to the speed of light in order to get a useful time differential going for that kind of purpose. the human culture I wanted to write about wouldn't possibly have the technology and so I ended up then having to say right in that case let's have the characters going in and out of suspended animation across the journey and that then gave me a huge number of other ways of exploring their society through the character Holster Mason just continually waking up into this.
gradually deteriorating sort of ship situation. So that actually turned out to be a much better way of approaching it. But I was guided there because I couldn't make the science work with the original idea. But that's good though, the science, like, I think... This is something that I've talked about before, but limitations and fact end up creating more as opposed to restricting creativity.
Yeah, I mean, it can be a bit of both. There have been a couple of times where I've basically just reached a complete standstill with an idea because I've realised there is a logical problem, which if I want to do this as a hard sci-fi book rather than a fantasy... I literally can't get past. So I've actually, you know, there have been books I've had to shelve after a couple of chapters when I've suddenly realised actually this literally just doesn't work and I cannot work out how to make it.
It doesn't happen often, but it is extremely relaxing when it does.
now i think it seems a fitting transition to to talk about one of your more recent releases which is alien clay um so this one it came out earlier in the year in the uk and uh came out very recently in the US, but that one... from my perspective like very much picks apart the role of humans in relation to natural environment in this case it's an alien one but also what it like means to be human so how did this story kind of take root in your mind and what were you hoping to achieve with it
A number of my books tend to come from two places at once. So, you know, sometimes you'll get an idea and you think, well, they're half a book's worth of idea in that. And I will kind of park that and see if something else turns up that fits Legos neatly into it.
So I wanted very much to write a book about an alien ecosystem that did not work like... our human ecosystems, because one of the things you tend to see, I mean, part of the book is the idea of how humans export ideas unexamined and assume that what our local conditions are going to be universal conditions.
And so one of the things that doesn't work on the world of Kiln like it does here is how species interact, because Darwinian competition doesn't work in the same way the evolution of the planet is worked on. symbiosis and cooperation and the more an individual sort of unit of life is able to interact with other units of life usefully and create larger creatures between them. That's how the survival of the fittest is going on that world.
and that was a fascinating thought experiment in and of itself but obviously I couldn't just do a whole sort of spoof David Attenborough alien world documentary so I needed humans in there somewhere and So you then have the human part of it, which is it's an exploration of... authoritarianism and resistance and just the ability to cooperate and communicate in that kind of extremely repressive society.
As it happens, these two themes complement each other extremely well, and you can use each one to examine the other. That was all terribly serendipitous. And I think basically I'm generally in debt to my own subconscious in a way of just finding ideas that work together in a way I'm not consciously aware of when I'm fitting them.
That's the beautiful symbiosis of writing and creativity. It's like, where the fuck did that come from? And it just kind of, like, the pieces just fit together so perfectly. I want to elaborate a bit on this. notion of knowledge and ideas. that you explore in the book, you know, the ways in which it dissects academia and science and how the dissemination of ideas and knowledge can be controlled by authoritarian forces and how that relates to this life. symbiotic world that you created.
Well this is so... One of the fascinating things, almost one of the hopeful things about the way the human mind works is when you encounter this kind of totalitarian, authoritarian system. you tend to find that the simple fact of having all the guns and having all the power and all the control over people's lives is not psychologically sufficient for tyrants and dictators and oppressive regimes.
There is almost always an appeal to a higher power to justify why those regimes are allowed to do what they want.
And in the past, this has been, you know, we have religious power, the idea, well, God wants it this way. Or we have the idea that, well, this is, we are being scientific and science wants it this way. But it... either way it is twisting the precepts of whatever they are calling upon to justify what they're doing because for some reason simply physically having the power doesn't seem to be enough And I find that absolutely fascinating. but you get this
Simple physical power doesn't seem to be able to exist without an ideological justification. And so that's what you get with the society, the mandate, as it's called, in Alien Clay. They have a little motto, which is that the universe has a purpose and the purpose is us or something very, very close. I can't remember the precise wording that's removed.
Yeah but that's what and it is tyrannically humanist and the idea is they need to believe that They believe in a philanthropic universe, i.e. a universe whose conditions are naturally going to create life and that the life will be Earth-like life and that the Earth-like life will give rise to something like people.
And now they have come across this world of kiln where the life doesn't work in any way like this. And they have sent a scientific team backed by a whole sort of population of comic labourers. say, right, make sense of this, make it work, make it fit our orthodox... And in doing so, they're highlighting how ridiculous that orthodoxy is.
But they still have the guns, and no one can really say it to death. But the guns change hands. I think that's such an interesting kind of way to explore it, because, yeah, like... making it, forcing it to fit the orthodoxy. So it's like finding like ruins and a written sort of like hieroglyphic language. on these ruins the mandate just like can't comprehend that anyone other than some anthropomorphize the human life.
Alien species could have created this and so I thought that was for me like the most interesting part of it and it made me think so much of all the science fiction that I enjoyed growing up like Um... This is something that I loved about Mass Effect.
for example was that yes there are bipedal alien species because of course and it makes it makes obviously for a video game it makes that much easier but then they had some really like weird alien species to kind of show you It doesn't all have to be so perfectly aligned with how biology developed on Earth, how our ecosystem developed, and how we fit. So I think that those kinds of explorations of like aliens that are beyond.
the 20th century kind of conception of aliens. You know, if you go back and watch alien movies throughout the 20th century, most of the time they look pretty. Also, because there's probably this actor in a costume, so they kind of have to. When you're dealing with film, there are effects and budgetary limitations to that. things I should absolutely highlight that's come out.
Very recently, there was a show called Scavenger's Reign, which works rather beautifully, almost like a companion piece to Alien Clay, with just the way the ecosystem works. And that is... a genuinely beautiful exploration of just how wild alien life could be whilst also being eminently logical all the way through it's a phenomenal and Just quite unexpected piece of really nice hard time. I watched that show in September and then read Alien Clay after it. So it was like perfect companion piece.
I knew you would love that show. But I'm really bummed because they cancelled the second season. I had heard there was a second series coming. I think they cancelled it. Hopefully it gets picked up by some other... Okay, because I had heard more recently that there was than that there wasn't, but I might just have got the news out of order. I guess I will go and have a hunt on the internet.
worst fucking trend. Well, I mean, I do wonder if it's had enough of a viewership since it came out on Netflix that might have rescued it. Fingers crossed. Right. They cancelled it. Yeah. Well, I want to talk about the... book that's releasing in the UK this week when this episode comes out because, you know, we talked a little bit about authoritarianism and totalitarianism in Alien Clay and that's something that's also explored in the Tyrant Philosopher series.
So Days of Shattered Faith is releasing this week in the UK. But the series starts with City of Last Chances. So, listeners, if you haven't picked that one up yet, what are you doing? Go get it.
So I want to talk about the world to start with. I mean, I think in any... book especially you know sff um the world is a character so to speak but i feel like in this series in particular it is very much like a center stage character the city um but let's talk about the kingdom Why was the unrelenting kingdom of Palestine and their quest for their domination, you know, perfection and correction, why is this such an ideal vehicle for exploring kind of the big themes in this?
series control war religion yeah so uh yes the the palace i mean they're not they're not even uh they're not a kingdom even they've absolutely done away with all of that because that in itself would be irrational imperfect they are They're almost like tyrannical academics, is really the type of thing. Their aim is they want to perfect the world, and they're in a very imperfect world. They're in a world with lots of gods and lots of magic and all this sort of thing.
And they, in fact, the Palestine people were previously sort of under the domination of a particularly unpleasant sea god and had to, you know, Maldemar had to make all these sacrifices and so forth. basically got to the point of saying, why are we doing this? What are we getting out of this? And so they just disposed of their god and decided we are going to rid the world of this sort of nonsense.
which has been going on for a few centuries by the time the first book comes out. And their way of doing this is to either... to take over either diplomatically or militarily. nation after nation, and then just completely rid it of anything they consider imperfect, which is to say they impose their language, their weights and measures, their commerce. their ideals, their way of doing every little thing.
They absolutely get rid of any kind of shred of religion or superstition or anything like that. And they mostly do it by basically taking... your religious icons and your magical books and indeed your actual gods and just melting them down for all magic to power all their stuff. And one of the... I think one of the reasons... I'm looking at this kind of almost bureaucratic evil is actually you get to see how...
This sort of tyranny is not only evil and cruel, and often just, because it's bureaucratic, it's often just pointlessly, facelessly cruel, that you are demanding people... comply with all of these rules no matter what their situation is. Because if you do all this, everything will obviously be better for you.
because this is what we consider to be perfect, but also it shows how phenomenally trivial and petty a lot of this stuff is. And it's something we see a lot in the real world, the incredibly small details that unpleasant people are willing to go to. to regulate other people's lives just because they can.
And in a way, I would say at least the Palestine have the ostensible excuse that they're trying to bring perfection to the world, even though when you look at the way they act, actually, they're a whole bunch of factional sort of boot-filling brigands all out for their own careers and gains.
whereas in the real world an awful lot of those things seems to lack even the even a sort of a tissue thin justification for why people decide to make other people's lives miserable but the idea that yes the idea that well you've got to do things this way and you're not allowed to sing that song and you're not allowed to speak your own language which is the thing
The book, the general feel of the book is kind of like 1700s to 1900s sort of colonialism era, with the Palestine as one of the big colonial powers in the world. And the idea that when they move in, yes, you are not allowed to speak your own language, and it's literally a criminal offence, will be very familiar to... um you know a variety of people like yeah it's been that you know it's been that way in
various territories quite close to home in the UK, for example. They are indeed parts of the UK. So, that kind of... the really, really banal attention to detail of this particular sort of repressive regime that is actually far more impactful than people just saying, oh yes, we now own your country.
because i think uh yeah like not kingdom but like an unrelenting bureaucracy i think is like yeah like the best way to put it yeah and not only that i like i like how across all the books you can see that as you said everyone's kind of out for themselves so it's kind of like this bureaucracy comprised of sycophants and and just kind of like how Everybody is using, or at least from the Palestine side of things, they're using this system, this bureaucracy, to kind of further their own gain.
take advantage. I'm sure we're not short of real world examples of when you have these particularly unpleasant authoritarian regimes which swear by the rule of law and decency and on and so forth and are patently just a pack of pirates trying to raid, pillage absolutely everything they can while there is still something left to pillage. MJ and I have been raving about the show Severance recently and I think that is a really an equally cool exploration of this sort of like bureaucratization of
In that case, it's more like the human soul and the spirit. Just crush it beneath a bureaucratic foot. But I think in The Tyrant Philosophers... The reason I think it works is because you are doing it through this lens of sort of interwoven vignette. That's that's like the format of the series so you have
They're almost kind of like short stories that are leading from one into the other. So one story will present a character and then something will happen to them or they will make a decision that kind of causes a cascade of effects. And then the subsequent stories are extending from that from the point of view of a different character. So why did you decide to kind of like format these books in that way?
So as an entirely separate thing, this was something I had been wanting to do for a very long time. I was very much inspired by the Australian writer Angela Slatter. who wrote a series of short story collections, Sourdough, Bitterwood Bible, and there's a third one I've actually got on my reading part at the moment, where the stories all kind of link together and you start to see characters from previous stories turning up. And I thought...
I don't think I'll be able to manage to pull that off with an actual short story collection because I tend to write more interlinked stuff, but I really wanted to do that kind of building the story out of all of these little pieces. And, yeah, I mean, it was a bit of an experimental book for me because I didn't plot it in a way that I normally would.
I did the world design and the character design and set up all of these initial pressures and friction points. And then I just basically followed everyone around with a notebook. recording what they did. which was a bit hair-raising to do at first because obviously I didn't know whether the book would even have an end or whether it would just be still going after 500,000 words or anything like that.
But it all came, everything came together very nicely and has done for each of the books within a list. I mean, they're not short books, but at least they are within general tolerance for large fantasy book length.
And it means that things go often go in lots of very interesting directions because the characters are in the driving seat. But the other thing I wanted to do with these books is This is a big fantasy world and there is a big fantasy story going on with the rise and resistance to the palestine sway. And that is the background. That is not the main plot of the book. The characters in the book generally are trying not to have anything to do with this because they are just regular people.
In the first book there are regular people just living in this occupied city and there is going to be a revolution and most of them don't want anything to do with it because being in a revolution is very dangerous. In the second book there is a war on and the book is set in an army camp at the characters. are very low grade, and they are in the medical tent, so they don't ever see the fighting going on, and they just get to see the casualties, and because they are all kind of non...
doctrine and non-perfect. They are sort of hanging around waiting to see if the next time the orders come through they are now going to be executed for their various peculiarities. And so it's all of these stories are told. generally from the point of view of people who are... tangential to the main big story going on in the world. And so you see the big story going on across the background of all the books, but each book is this slice of life of these people's lives.
when things just go to the wall. Yeah, I think that creates a lot of depth with the world. You see from so many different perspectives that you can start to develop a better sense of the overarching background in your mind.
i saw someone made like the perfect comp for book two which was like revolutionary fantasy mash um anyone who's seen that that uh that old show mash because it's like everyone you know it's on on the front lines in a in a medical tent and stuff so it's very But for you personally, it's like with your goal to do this, to write this type of story in this kind of format, did you come across certain storytelling freedoms or any particular constraints that doing it...
I mean, it fell out. It's fallen out relatively naturally, which I'm quite pleased with. It's certainly, like I say, There are definitely points where you just write, I don't really know where the story is going. I don't know if this little bit of the story is necessarily going to link back in or whether I'm just doing a little here as a window on the world. I won't move on. But usually you get to a point later on where you think, oh, I can have a callback to that previous chapter.
and therefore it all knits together quite nicely. I mean, there is a whole... One of the subplots going on in City of Last Chances is basically a Maltese Falcon thing, where there is a particular MacGuffin. a lot of people want and there is a selection of people who might conceivably have it. And because of the way I was writing the book, I didn't know who had it. But I had to write points of view sections from all of those characters without giving away whether they had it or not.
which was an interesting challenge. But I think it was a cool reveal. Yeah! But the other thing is, I got to a certain point in the book and I realised, oh, that's who's got it. And I didn't decide, it was just like, yes, that's got to be the only logical way, that's got to be the character who has it. So it was very much just listening to where the book wanted to go and where the characters wanted to go. Maltese Falcon is a perfect reference for that.
I love that. Oh, my gosh. Also, though, that sounds so stressful in a draft year. Yeah, she's like, where's my Excel spreadsheet? This is bullshit. I know, I need my plot. well listen I don't think I could have done this a few years ago I think the reason I'm able to kind of just sort of go without the safety net is simply that I've been doing this long enough and written enough books that I'm confident enough in my own ability to get myself out of all.
Yeah. There's like those projects like, I'm going to save you for later because I'm not. I do have some of those where I'm like, I am not smart enough to write you yet. More skilled enough. So let's talk. Yeah, right, we'll get there. Let's talk about the Days of Shattered Faith specifically a little bit, which I know is always tricky because it's later in the series. Yeah, but they're all independent. They're all independent, but you know. Yeah, I mean, that's actually the foe.
What I'm trying to do with these books is that each book has Easter eggs and callbacks to the previous ones, but you should be able to pick up Days of Shattered Faith.
on its own and if you have read the others you will start to say oh that character is actually this other character from the previous book but the books are written in a way that you don't need to know there is There's kind of Easter egg level stuff, but hopefully there's not that point where this character turns up and you're supposed to know who they are and everything hangs on you knowing what they did in the previous book or anything like that.
The idea is that the whole series will work like this, but also I am kind of planning for the fifth and final book of the series to go back to the city of the first book. So whether I will be able to keep that up, I really don't know. You'll figure it out. That's the plan, though. But I think the good thing is that each book is sort of tackling... different broader theme.
Let's say, you know, like book two is very much focused on war and the effects of war. Book three is very much digging into sort of like faith. and belief in that kind of stuff. Book 3 also, it's basically diplomatic relations, because again, you've got this, because it's that kind of 1800s,
And you've got a lot going on with, like, this is a colonial power. And as well as just sort of marching in with the boots and the guns, obviously they also have the soft power of things, which is something that fantasy doesn't tend to explore. a great deal. And so this is the largest point of view in this book is a Palestinian ambassador who has basically become overly...
involved with the situation in the nation she has a post in. And obviously she is then caught between the... the palisine uh when they decide right we really need to formally take this place over now and the and her fondness for the place she's been living in yeah because i think that's that's something about colonialism that people don't often think about is like The people who are colonizing but actually like boots on the ground.
very often fall in love with the place that they're colonizing and start to become... Well, there is... One of the things I'm drawing on is the history of the East India. company and there is this fascinating kind of early phase of the East India Company where they're still not good guys by any means but they kind of The people who are over there, they are basically, they are living much more of an Indianised life.
I mean, I suspect the way it would have been described by the people back in London, they are fraternising in ways that the people back in London don't like. And so there is this enormous house clearing and a lot of doors saying, well, you are not allowed to do this, you're not allowed to do this, you've always got to dress in this way.
Basically, you do not go native in that kind of sense, but there is a point where that is happening, and there presumably must have been a considerable amount of friction and resistance from the people. who were over there and who were sort of actually accepting a lot of what the place had to offer, who were then told, no, no, we are not importing culture, we are exporting culture. Don't you dare enjoy... This bland British food and go over to India. Have your beans. Have your beans.
amazing so we've got days of shattered faith coming out this week you've mentioned that there's Five bucks and nine. series uh that are will be it's proving to be an extremely fertile setting so there's going to be five novels and probably at least two novella length extra extra things thrown in and Maybe more because it's turned out to be a setting I just enjoy writing in so much.
The amount of stuff in the world is so much more than the stuff that's actually likely to get fitted into any of the books. Yeah, well, I love the way that you've been exploring it, too, as we talked about earlier in those vignettes. I think that does give you so much.
I don't know, room to play and to do all these things. And as a reader, it's really fun to see all the different angles, you know, of the same world. So, oh, I'm excited. What else have you got on the horizon? I know you have a book coming out in February called Shroud. Yes, so Shroud is a standalone hard sci-fi book. In this case, it is another weird alien planet one, but it's a survival story.
It's a very, very hostile planet in equal to human life in terms of atmosphere, pressure, and the fact that it's completely lightless. down below you have two people who get stuck there in a vehicle which is obviously not going to last that long under the conditions and because the life on this world communicates and senses through the electromagnetic spectrum. the whole planet is constantly alive with electromagnetic signal on every bandwidth. And so...
The people stuck down below cannot in any way signal the ship they came from. They have no way of letting people know they're even still alive. I like this. It's almost like survival horror. That's going to be amazing. Stressful, yeah, right? I love it. Brilliant, buddy. Well, closing out, I'm going to ask you a two-parter if you can give listeners and viewers, A, a good bit of soundbite writing advice, and B, tell us a weird or random fact that you find.
So I always have a problem with soundbite writing advice because I know every writer has their own way of going about things. So a thing that works for me. is not necessarily going to be a thing that works for... another writer in any way so other than these very kind of generic sticking classes of oh well make sure it's as good as possible before
You submit and stuff like that. I never know anything that's going to be a particularly general use. Well, that's okay. I think that that's a particularly general use, though, to say that everyone has their own process and if someone's giving kind of a dogmatic piece... And funny enough, most of our guests have trouble with the soundbite, right? Most of them have trouble with the weird random fact, which I know you'll be telling. Yeah, I feel like you will not struggle with that one, maybe.
Weird fact I learned a little while ago is that on the subject of mass units, ants do surgery. Really? There are species of ants where if they get a fungal infection, They, in a limb, they will stand still while other ants amputate their limb for them to stop it spreading. And the other ants will only do this if the infection is in a part of the leg where it's likely to be spread by the ants kind of circulatory. hollow circulatory system and it is just
And it definitively improves sort of survivability in the patient. And it's just like, this is the thing that's evolved. That is a whole system of extremely efficient targeted. surgery that has evolved in a colonial insect. And is there any way that the limb can grow back? Do ants have the ability to... I don't think so, but they are... You've got six legs, you can get along with five. So...
And it's, I mean, this is the other thing. Fuck man, I've gotten, I've gotten fungi on all six of my limbs. This is, I mean, it's one of the other things that, I mean. With people tend to misunderstand collodial insects a great deal
And one of the things is you tend to think of them a bit like the whole Starship Troopers thing where, yes, it's this ravening horde of things and they will just keep going until they're all dead and that kind of thing with no thought for that. But actually, there's an awful lot of ant adaptations which are to do with preserving the lives of individual ants. and not not wasting um not just sort of stupidly wasting your your resources
It's not like every ant is fodder. It's like, no, every ant has its place and its function within the hierarchy and the survival of one ant. Also, there appear to be lazy ants. People have just found, yeah, in some colonies there are some ants that just don't pull their weight and just kind of nod along and eat the food and don't really do the work. So it's just like that. Just leeching off of the colony. Get out of here.
Well, that's a brilliant fact. I'm going to look into this a little bit more because it's fascinating. Dr. Ants. I like it. Days of shattered ants. Adrian, thank you so much for chatting with MJ and I today. Really appreciate it. Having you back on the show. It's been a blast. Thanks very much for having me on. Pleasure. Could you please let everyone know where they can find you online?
Yes, my main platform for social media is BlueSky. And other than that, AdrienneTrakopto.com has a contact form you can use if you do wish to get hold of it. Brilliant. And if you want fantasy, sci-fi, space opera, hard sci-fi, it's like you got, what did you say, 55? You got options. Yeah, you got lots of stuff to dabble in. So go support this one. You can also support SFF Addicts. Check us out on social media.
pod. We're pretty much on all the platforms. I'm also on all the platforms. You can pick up Mushroom Blues if you want to enjoy some fungal noir. MJ, what about... Yeah, you can find me across all the main socials at MJKoonBook. Or just go to mjacoon.com. You can sign up for my newsletter, get my free novella or novella.
Sorry, it's not quite an envelope. Or you can help me feed this cat that you see in the background, if I can point. He's just chilling. And buy my books. Yeah. So there you go. He's like the lazy ant. he is the lazy aunt but he he pulls his weight with cuteness so we allow it thanks Lauren thank you
All right, well, that's it for this episode. Stay tuned next week for part two with Adrian for a mini masterclass on consequences in world creation. For now, keep reading, keep imagining, and we'll see you next time on SFF Addicts.