Adrian Czajkowski (Tchaikovsky) moves between genres as easily as a spider weaves its web. Hard science fiction (the Children of Time books), space opera (the Final Architecture trilogy), epic fantasy (the Shadows of the Apt series), dystopia (Ogres, Firewalkers), dying earth fiction (Cage of Souls), military sci-fi (Dogs of War)—the list goes on. Tchaikovsky has published more than 30 books in the last 15 years. This year alone sees the publication of three new books: two science fiction novels (Service Model in June, Alien Clay in October) and a novella (Saturation Point in July). The third novel of the Tyrant Philosophers fantasy series, Days of Shattered Faith, comes out early next year. Tchaikovsky attributes his productivity to a regular writing schedule—mornings spent on his computer at local cafés—rather than superhuman imagination or graphomania. Still, amidst this tidal wave of invention, it can be difficult to discern what makes Czajkowski Tchaikovsky—what makes his fiction as distinct as the creepy-crawly creatures of which he’s obviously so fond.
It’s the wildly imaginative premises of his work that immediately jump out to the reader: giant spiders turning ant colonies into computers to calculate the movement of the stars; an emaciated priest, the last worshipper of a tiny, invisible god, healing the wounded, only on the condition that they renounce all violence; alien beings the size of moons transforming planets into avant-garde sculptures with no concern for the millions, even billions, of lives lost. But good ideas don’t make writers; they’re the raw material of literature—points of departure, not destinations. What makes Tchaikovsky one of the most interesting writers of speculative fiction today is what he does with those premises, specifically, the way that he builds worlds that exceed the stories they contain; the ecological bent of his fictions, the exuberance not so much of individual organisms but of life’s many-layered relationships; and an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist perspective that elevates the collective good without losing sight of individual freedom.
Tchaikovsky is a meticulous builder of worlds. It’s a quality, he’s said in interviews, that he owes to his experience as a GM (game master) running campaigns for tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, he realized that he could be a writer when he discovered the Dragonlance series, novels based on a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that Tchaikovsky’s novels resemble roleplaying games not just in their intricate descriptions of settings but in their insistence on the many, many stories that inhabit a world: there is always another adventure besides the protagonist’s tale, not to mention before and after it. In Spiderlight (2016), Tchaikovsky’s sympathetic parody of Tolkien, the big bad, Darvezian, is not the Dark Lord but the most recent Dark Lord. The novel reads like a work of classical fantasy fiction, something Robert Jordan might have penned, or like an old D&D module, The Keep on the Borderland, for example: a party of adventurers travels from town to town, frequenting seedy inns, fighting Orc-like creatures (the Ghant), in a quest to rid the world of evil.
Except Tchaikovsky turns the moral drama of fantasy—the battle between light and dark, heroic humans and dastardly monsters—on its head when the party’s wizard, Penthos, turns a spider into a complicated human character. That the wizard is less Gandalf, more horny pyromaniac, is the reader’s first clue that the world of Spiderlight is trickier than it first appears. Penthos conscripts the spider-turned-human to serve as a guide through the borders of the Dark Lord’s kingdom, but what he gets isn’t a mindless drone but a person struggling to make sense of their new body, negotiating their conflicting loyalties between spider nest and epic quest, wishing they could return to the webbed simplicity of their past. Nth, as this transfigured creature comes to be named, pierces a hole through the simplistic moral order of much fantasy fiction in an implicit argument that worldbuilding doesn’t have to mean multiplying hard-to-pronounce names and inserting a map at the front of the book. It can also mean weaving characters into a broad and knotty tapestry of cultures, histories, social issues, and political factions. Forget the Chose One. Like playing a roleplaying game with friends, characters aren’t destined for victory, they’re trying to survive the monsters, tough choices, and chance happenings that the game master—the author—throws their way.
Tchaikovsky’s worlds are too complicated for saviors. Yes, characters occasionally strike heroic poses, like the wizard of Elder Race (2021) who turns out to be a depressed anthropologist from another world. In a nod to Arthur C. Clarke, Elder Nyr’s magic is nothing more than advanced technology. His decision to come down from his mountaintop fortress and help the natives is an effort to alleviate boredom as much as an act of virtue. Meanwhile, Tchaikovsky’s novella Ogres (2022) dissects the value of the hero myth—the belief that one virtuous person might save the world—in the face of an unjust social system. The titular monsters of the title are feudal lords extraordinary in stature, brutal in their management of serfs; the hero, Torquell or “you” (the novella is told in the second-person), is exceptional not only in physical strength but in his willingness to fight the powers that be: “You’re a hero in the making after all. Heroes get to do these things. Otherwise, what would there be to write about when their lives are chronicled?” Sentences like these turn out to be ironic commentary on our tendency to reduce the history of social groups to tales of exceptional individuals. Without giving too much away, Ogres ends with a conceptual reversal—a plot twist, sure, but one that’s less about the events of the story than the perspective on those events—that suggests that heroes embody the traits and the power of communities (and that they’re only worth having around so long as they continue to do so).
Tchaikovsky may enjoy undercutting hero myths, but his work is neither cynical, nor grimdark. Joe Abercrombie, he is not. There is hope in his novels, but it’s invested in social connections, in communities rather than individuals. This faith in cooperation—in collective strength or social power—runs like a red thread through all of Tchaikovsky’s fiction. In his earliest published work, the Shadows of the Apt series, it’s obvious from the first novel, in which the character Stenwold rallies a diverse group of characters (Spider-Kinden, Beetle-Kinden, Dragonfly-Kinden, and so on: so many fantasy “races,” each defined by an insect archetype) in an effort to resist the Wasp Empire’s encroachments. The ten-book series chronicles a web of alliances and conflicts as complex as anything in A Song of Ice and Fire, but where Tchaikovsky distinguishes himself is in his worldbuilding, in peeling back the layers of one world to reveal another world not so much underneath but in its interstices, its gaps.
The sixth novel in the series, The Sea Watch (2011), tellingly dedicated to the British naturalists Gerald Durrell and David Attenborough, introduces an underwater kingdom and the Sea-Kinden that populate it. Cities constructed from coral are “so alien and beautiful,” with “towers and domes and spires and intricate skeletons of white stone, draped with fronds and frills and gills of waving plantlife, and all illuminated by great bulbous lamps of ghostly greens and bloody reds, brooding purples and violently bright blues.” What’s more, this world within a world is bursting with life, life that transgresses across the usual borders between the living and the inert:
The colony was alive, he saw then. It was alive in that sea life swarmed across it. The lights picked out a million sparks of fish in ever-changing constellations, the clinging slick hands of octopuses, high-stepping crabs picking their way sideways up the colony walls, shrimp the size of a man’s arm darting here and there in a flurry of beating legs. The colony was alive beyond all this, though, for its outer walls were built of life: cells and cells of it, each with its rosette of tiny arms.
This kind of moment abounds in Tchaikovsky’s fiction; it’s the ecological sublime, an instance in which our concept of life—our assumptions about what makes something living—explodes in the face not of an alien, but of an alien ecosystem.
But what exactly is ecology in Tchaikovsky’s fiction? I’ll let one of his characters, Ignaz Trethowan, explain. Trethowan is a rogue scientist in Cage of Souls (2019), a novel about the dregs of civilization on a dying Earth. He offers a textbook definition of ecology as “study[ing] the interrelations between living things and their environments.” Ecology is interdependence; it’s the web of life, the relations not just among species but between species and their habitats. All well and good, but for Trethowan ecology is also an indictment of humankind:
Ecology is of no interest to my people, who lock themselves from the world. It is hardly surprising when the world has grown so hostile. The sun is dying slowly, and wreaks havoc on us as we circle round it. Our world is being changed and poisoned and everything that was is passing. My home [the last remaining city, Shadrapar] is the last vestige of a long string of civilisations that have waxed and waned on the Earth. We ran out of resources and space and will.
A few tweaks and this could be a description of our own Earth, wracked as it is by climate crisis, plagued by a species enamored of its power over the planet but blind to its limitations.
Trethowan goes on to explain that despite the waning of civilization, life persists in strange, non-human forms:
Every time I ventured into the jungle there has been a new ecology waiting for me. Evolution works in our jungles almost fast enough to see. As the world becomes unlivable, so life throws up things that can survive in it, faster and faster. One ancient theory was that the planet was aware, a great living world-mind. If so, then that mind has woken up. Life is teeming in the world as never before, changing and changing in the hope of finding a form that can last, and it is not just insensate, animal urges that are being churned up by this flood. There is intelligence out there. We are no longer alone.
Trethowan’s reflections on life’s changeability sheds a light on some of the distinctive features of Tchaikovsky’s fiction. His writing eschews the moral clarity of good and evil (the white wizard versus the dark lord, or the violent insects of Starship Trooper versus gun-toting humans) in favor of investigations into otherness, and this otherness is lively: it’s changing and evolving; it’s intelligent, seething with thoughts that escape the grasp of human cognition. We’re not alone. Speculation is not solely the province of the human species. Other thoughts are possible.
Without spoiling too much of the book, in Cage of Souls, we find web children (amphibious humanoids that evolved separately from humans), an artificial man (a well-adjusted version of Frankenstein’s creature), a giant spider taking care of an ancient computer (Tchaikovsky can’t seem to get enough of spiders), and a building-sized robotic crab roaming the desert, to mention only a few of Tchaikovsky’s inventions. It’s a cast of creatures that crosses the grotesquery of a medieval bestiary with the systematic examination of life one finds in Darwin. Tchaikovsky’s aliens and monsters don’t so much crawl from the shadows (well, sometimes they do) as evolve, grow, and mutate. They emerge from the same material universe as we humans. What’s so fascinating about Tchaikovsky’s fiction, then, is our intimacy with the alien. There’s a sense that had evolution taken a slightly different course, we might have become them.
This kind of evolutionary “what if” is at the heart of a number of Tchaikovsky’s novels. In his multiverse thriller, The Doors of Eden (2020), a series of interludes drawn from a fictional scientific treatise, Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence, chart the different paths evolution has taken on the Earths of other dimensions. These chapters—the most interesting parts of the book, and I mean that as praise—are filled with giant trilobite-like creatures who eventually become a space-faring civilization; a hyper-aggressive scorpion-like species that only barely survives their “Great War to End All Wars”; and a race of “mudskipper-like things” that evolves into “one of the great technical civilizations”:
They have no industry you might recognize, and yet the ice caps of the world are their supercomputers, filigreed with metallic and chemical logic gates that they cultivate like gardens, flurrying with electronic thought. Their machines are sliding block puzzles, regulated by melt and flow and freeze. You would never spot their great engines, and yet in a mere millennium they pass from the primitive to a level of engineering sophistication that neither you nor we can imagine.
This last species manages to fend off the great Permian extinction event, which figures in every one of these speculative evolutionary timelines, only to fall prey to their own technological hubris: “They do everything they can in a vain quest for equilibrium, but this new fate—which they built themselves—is too much for them to undo. And perhaps there was never a time when they could have escaped. Perhaps they only ever had the choice between two deaths.”
Tchaikovsky inherits a certain pessimism from scientists like Darwin: the sense that for all the many shapes it can take, life must always contend with the harsh facts of material existence, not just limited resources, extinction-level catastrophes, and civilizational strife but the fundamental indifference of material existence. The universe wasn’t made for us, wasn’t made for any form of life at all; that life emerges is not fate but happenstance—a cosmological roll of the dice. Children of Time (2015)—winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award and certainly Tchaikovsky’s most popular novel—doesn’t abandon this pessimism, but it softens it, focusing on life’s adaptive and symbiotic qualities. It’s the first book in a series of the same name (which won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2023). Each book in the series introduces a nonhuman civilization: spiders, cephalopods, corvids: products of space colonization, genetic engineering, and terraforming projects gone awry. Human civilization on Earth wrecked itself not once but twice. The second iteration of human civilization takes to the stars in the hopes of finding a new home, only to discover that the first iteration accidentally populated planets with “uplifted” species from Earth. There’s no home away from home awaiting humanity, only difficult encounters with alien civilizations.
In Children of Time, the Portiid spiders build cities out of webs, construct computers from ant colonies, and struggle over gender inequality (in this spider species, the males are considered inferior and often eaten by the females after copulation). Tchaikovsky alternates perspectives between humans and spiders, giving readers sympathetic protagonists from each species, so that we see civilization not as some one-size-fits-all cultural template but as an adaptive response to natural conditions. Spider civilization and human civilization are very different responses to the same basic needs: food and shelter, of course, but also making sense of the world, finding amusement, and building community.
Of course, civilization changes, evolves. The humans on the colony ship divide into factions, debate the literal and figurative course of humanity, war against one another when no compromise is reached. The Portiids engage in their own intraspecies wars, the fight for gender equality eventually winning out because of one crafty male spider, Fabian, who plays rival cities against one another. When the humans and spiders eventually meet, each can only slowly recognize the other’s intelligence, not to mention their social and cultural complexities. Eventually, the two species fight, but the resolution is not the defeat of one side by the other but a union: the spiders and humans come together, forming a new, shared civilization:
The two peoples of the green world work together in easy harmony now. There was a generation of wary caution on both sides, but once the nanovirus had taken down those barriers—between species and between individuals—so much potential tragedy was already averted. Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy—the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too—conquers all, in the end.
Children of Time is an allegory of cultural recognition, a meditation on living with the differences of other people. It’s pessimistic in assuming that such contact will be difficult, that it will require shaky efforts at translation, rather than intuitive understanding, but it’s optimistic in showing how encounters between civilizations might evolve beyond conflict. Tchaikovsky imagines a third possibility beyond conflict and tolerance: symbiosis—a blending of species, of cultures, the invention of a whole different way of living. It’s an ecological approach to conflict. Tchaikovsky turns our attention to the interconnections that cross the divide between self and other, to the shared project of making and maintaining life in a cold and indifferent universe.
Tchaikovsky’s ecological perspective isn’t a neutral way of seeing the world. It goes along with his progressive commitments to equality, cooperation, and living with the Other. His fiction is filled with revolutions, some failures, some (tentative) successes. Oppressed peoples rise up against authoritarian regimes, as in City of Last Chances (2022), a work of urban fantasy that pits a rationalistic empire (think Steven Pinker meets the Spanish Inquisition) against the magical practices and religious beliefs of the city’s longtime dwellers. Students rebel against colonial education policies. Chained-up demons, working in factories, go on strike. Barricades go up, and they fall. Protest is one thing, going up against the system is another. That’s the ecological insight Tchaikovsky brings to politics, that social systems are like ecosystems: their equilibrium can be upset—sometimes need to be—but they’re also resilient, elastic, capable of absorbing change, of exerting pressure, sometimes violently, on the creatures inhabiting them. Worldbuilding as a writer is hard enough, building another world—a new society, a new civilization—is the ultimate challenge in both politics and the imagination.
Tchaikovsky joins those speculative writers, like Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and China Miéville, who refuse to take what it means to be human for granted. Revolution is less about taking power than remaking power. It means changing the terms of social existence, reimagining the ecology of everyday life, drafting blueprints for never-before-imagined habitats. Dogs of War (2017) starts out as military science fiction, its “Bioforms”—engineered and technologically-modified animal species: Komodo dragon sharpshooters; heavy artillery grizzly bears—good only for inflicting death and destruction. But the novel pivots, turning into the story of a struggle for social and political recognition: Are the Bioforms persons? If Honey (a Bioform bear) can do research on biotechnology, she’s surely worthy of rights, no? What would it take for Rex—a Bioform dog who transforms from leader of a death squad to leader of a civilian workforce—to become a full-fledged member of society? Or, as Rex voices it, with poignant simplicity: “I was made to be a weapon but I have lived a life. I was born an animal, they made me into a soldier and treated me as a thing. … Servant and slave, leader and follower, I tell myself I have been a Good Dog. Nobody else can decide that for me.” Can we imagine a society that didn’t have a sign on the door, reading: “For Humans Only”? (This question isn’t purely theoretical, by the way, as animal rights activists and lawyers can tell you.)
This isn’t Animal Farm. When Tchaikovsky writes about giant spiders, they’re not metaphors—they’re spiders. Bioforms might be persons, but they’re neither human nor dog, bear, or lizard. They’re hybrids that muddle the boundaries between the human and nonhuman. Tchaikovsky’s fiction cultivates radical empathy, not just concern for others but, as he puts it, “the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too.” More than empathy, though, Tchaikovsky writes the alien. He does so even when he isn’t writing about extraterrestrials. The alien is the kind of strangeness that calls into question our conventional understandings of people, the world, and our place in the universe. It reminds us that things aren’t always what they seem, and that even when they are, they can and will (at least, in the evolutionary long run) change.
Tchaikovsky’s most recent novel, Alien Clay (2024) brings this point home with a stunning setting: a planet, Kiln, on which there are no individual organisms, only gangly symbiotes, strange combinations of organs and flesh composing funky alien life forms: “Everything on Kiln is part of a network that includes everything else. Even the most hostile interactions, predator and prey, are still working to a pattern of mutual benefit.” Kiln is also the site of a prison colony for dissidents against the Mandate, an authoritarian regime all too enamored with human superiority, unwilling to accept knowledge that doesn’t put humans at the top of the metaphysical ladder. This conflict—human exceptionalism versus alien equality; status quo hierarchy versus the weird tumult of life—doesn’t just drive the narrative, it sums up the ethos of Tchaikovsky’s fiction. It’s the ecological sublime, the alien not as invader but as the thing already inside of us: “The thought of what we might become is irresistible.” I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Alien Clay ends not with human triumph but with mutation—life changing utterly, a new existence is born.
I know I’m not the only one to have been submerged in the flood of alien life that is Tchaikovsky’s fiction. What are some of your favorite works by Tchaikovsky? What about favorite characters or favorite ideas? (I didn’t even get a chance to talk about the uncanny intelligence of the corvids in Children of Memory.) Who are some other writers of the ecological sublime—encounters with alien webs of life—that belong in Tchaikovsky’s company? What’s some recent writing (or classics) that’s drawn you in with the attractions of becoming something other than human?
