This week we were joined by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a sci-fi and fantasy author most well known for writing the award-winning Children of Time series. His books often discuss the interactions between unique artificial and biological intelligences, and for this year’s Hugo awards he has two nominees for Best Novel in that space with Alien Clay and Service Model.
We discuss Alien Clay, the allure of existing at the end of time, the differences between British and American Sci-fi, and the historical and biological inspirations for Adrian Tchaikovsky’s fiction.
Thanks for listening!
TIMESTAMPS:
0:12 - Introduction
1:48 - Alien Clay as a new perspective on evolution with more cooperation than competition
4:03 - Autocratic regimes are desperate for an external moral or scientific justification for their actions
5:38 - Politics as an outlet for our more sadistic impulses
8:25 - Is having a rigidly defined sense of self an evolutionary or cultural?
13:12 - Are the bacteria in your microbiome part of you?
18:50 - Alien Clay as a more pro-science Annihilation
25:56 - Writing novels should be seen as a collaborative rather than competitive ecosystem
29:49 - What inspires you from history?
35:18 - The tragedy of losing information
40:22 - “One Day This Will All Be Yours” and the allure of existing at the end of time
45:30 - People prefer imagining a barren planet that dies with us, then a vibrant one that outlasts us
47:08 - Climate change does not hurt the Earth, it hurts those on the Earth including us
50:24 - Changes in scientific understanding take a long time to proliferate through culture: dinosaurs are still depicted as scaly rather than feathered
53:45 - The differences in American and British Sci-fi
57:49 - Do you think in terms of genre when writing Sci-fi vs. Fantasy?
1:00:40 - Elder Race and creating a narrative where neither the high-tech or low-tech characters are prepared for the monster
1:04:05 - Conclusion and final recommendations upcoming release of Adrian Tchaikovsky's book “Shroud” and short story collection “Our Savage Heart” by Justina Robson
1:04:52 - Start of Synthesized Sunsets Backstage
1:07:32 - Reasoning not talking about Children of Time in the interview, but talking about it now
1:11:09 - Children of Time would make a good prestige Sci-fi TV show
1:15:05 - Kevin really likes “One Day This Will All Be Yours”
1:18:35 - Discussing The Web Fiction Canon article
1:20:08 - Web serial fantasy
1:24:05 - Any form of serialized entertainment tends to generally start ok get better and then slowly get worse over a long time
1:26:22 - Rational Fiction
1:30:59 - /newwave/
1:34:53 - Interactive Fiction
1:35:51 - The line between interactive fiction and video games is blurry
1:37:28 - 17776 and the potential for more parallax fiction
1:40:08 - Conclusion
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