Books by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Tchaikovsky told Fantasy Hive, ‘For Shroud I wanted to get away from Earth life as much as possible.’ So he crash-lands two members of a profiteering crew on a moon which is lightless, high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen and highly radioactive… and then introduces the dominant species. Writing for Locus Mag, Alexandra Pierce describes the result as ‘an epic first-contact novel… delivers one of the most intriguing visions of alien/human interaction that I’ve read in many years.'” Read more...

The Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy Novels

Sylvia Bishop,

“This book started because I very much wanted to write from the point of view of a robot…There are things that we would think of as absolutely basic impulses for a human being which Uncharles doesn’t really care about, up to and including self-preservation. There are a variety of circumstances in the book where it’s perfectly logical that he allow himself to be destroyed, because there’s no particular reason why he wouldn’t. As the book goes on, and as things get more complex and confused, he gets more and more inputs – and you start to see that maybe there is more going on with Uncharles’s interior than he would necessarily admit. But it is at least an open question, even at the end of the book, as to just how much Uncharles is a thinking and sapient being, and how much he is simply sentient and following a complex logic chain.” Read more...

Dystopian Sci Fi Books

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Novelist

“Cage of Souls uses the ‘dying Earth’ trope: we are in the final city on Earth, during what we might term as a slow apocalypse. Everything is dying, everything is running down. There’s still a lot of technology that we would all consider hugely advanced, but he doesn’t explain how any of it works; in fact, the characters don’t know, and that sense of decline is what informs the book. Humanity is dying out. The rest of the planet, however, may not be, not just yet anyhow.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction of 2020

Tom Hunter, Journalist