Adrian Tchaikovsky
British science fiction of the early twenty-first century has seen a sustained renewal of interest in large-scale speculative storytelling, with writers drawing on both the scientific and the humanistic to push the genre's conceptual range. Adrian Tchaikovsky, born on 14 June 1972 in Woodhall Spa, belongs to that current — a UK citizen who works in English and trained at the University of Reading before building a career that spans both legal practice and literary production.
Tchaikovsky works as a writer, jurist, and legal executive, a combination that sets him apart from the purely academic or workshop-trained paths more common among genre authors. His fiction falls within science fiction specifically, and his Children of Time series became the work for which he is best known, earning the Hugo Award for Best Series. That recognition places him among a relatively small number of British writers to have received the award in that category, and it reflects the scale and ambition of the project.
The honors he has received extend well beyond a single prize. He has been awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award for Best Novel, two of British science fiction's most closely watched distinctions. He has also received the BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction and the Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel, indicating a range across both length and genre. The breadth of that recognition across multiple award bodies marks the consistent critical attention his work has drawn over the course of his career.
Quotes by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Are they wondering if Lain and I will save them by being here? Because, if so, they weren’t listening to Guyen closely enough before.
It is a great poison, to know you have a destiny and that everything you do is right by default.
The acerbic computer helpfully attaches a legend identifying just which pieces of the wreckage are Meshner and Fabian, because she always has computing power for put-downs.
The act of courtship is consummated as a public ritual, where the hopeful males – in their moment of prominence – perform in front of a peer group, or even the whole city, before the female chooses her partner and accepts his package of sperm. She may then kill and eat him, which is thought to be a great honour for the victim, although even Portia suspects that the males do not quite see it that way.
The sun had been so much brighter then, in his memories. It had shone every day.
They are performing that oldest of tricks: constructing a path by which to reach a destination, only in this case the destination is permanent security. With each step they take towards it, that security recedes. And, with each step they take, the cost of progressing towards such security grows, and the actions required to move forward become more and more extreme.
Negotiations with the locals have gone sufficiently well –now that Portia and her party have established their superiority –and the incumbents have lent the three travellers a male to serve as a guide in the lands to the north.
The entire elaborate operation looked good on paper to anyone who didn’t suspect he’d gone through it solely because he wanted more space for fishtanks.
I have a vision of tomorrow’s war, between people who have made themselves the slaves of entities that only exist in the heads of men, and people who want to be free. I hope I am wrong.
I don’t understand them. They don’t understand me. At the same time, we both understand each other.