#adrian tchaikovsky

[shadowpeople]

I hope Adrian Tchaikovsky doesn't feel like he can't write any more books about sentient spiders just because he's done it multiple times already. Because I don't think I have a limit in all honesty. There's no point at which I'd be like "ok Adrian, that's enough sentient spiders!" He could keep writing books about sentient spiders indefinitely and I would just keep reading them.

#adrian tchaikovsky #children of time #children of ruin #spiderlight #I have not read children of memory yet but fingers crossed that one will have more Portiids as well

[pluurankeli]

#adrian tchaikovsky #books #science fiction #illustration #spiders #children of time

[ghostinthegallery]

Taking a break from complaining about necron treatment to complain about Tyranid treatment! Because the fact that nids don't have their own books/lore/characters is bonkers to me. "Oooooh, they're too vast and alien to comprehend blah blah blah giving them characters undermines the mystery and horror..." NO! COWARDS! You want to sit there and tell me no author in the history of science fiction has ever effectively written from the POV of the alien? The inhuman? Made it both chilling and sympathetic? Never???

Gee it sure would be nice if Games Workshop had ever worked with a Hugo Award-winning author who had previously written a series including the POVs of hyper-evolved intelligent alien spiders. And it would be even better if that author had already written a book about Genestealers and so likely understood tyranid lore. OH NO WHERE SHALL WE FIND SUCH AN INDIVIDUAL???

Oh hey look it's Adrian Tchaikovsky! Author of the fantastic 40k book Day of Ascension. Go! Give him a pile of money to solve the Tyranid lore problem. Robert Rath and Nate Crowley fixed necrons, this clearly can be done. Hive tyrants and lictors already have enough individual personality to become characters in their own rights. Deathleaper exists. This is so, so doable.

There, solved the problem. I expect my copy of the new Tyranid novel in the mail. You're welcome

#warhammer 40k #wh40k #Tyranids #day of ascension really is a banger #adrian tchaikovsky #really great author #underrated 40k book honestly #i would like tyranid books plz #and there are definitely authors that can balance the challenges of portraying the alien and inhuman #just let them get creative

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #14 – And Put Away Childish Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This book I basically came across by chance. Or, well, not exactly chance, but I’d never even heard of it before until I checked what Tchaikovsky books my local library system had copies of and saw it. Which in a sense is a terrible way to come into this – it’s an incredibly dramatic swerve from any of Tchaikovsky’s other stuff that I’ve read – but coming in totally blind pretty much worked, I think. Genuinely very fun read.

The story follows Harry Bodie, a children’s TV presenter facing down middle age with a career that’s never really lived up to expectations. Somewhat desperately, he signs on to a tabloid-ish program about digging into the family tree, hoping to use the residual fame of his grandmother and her fairly famous and successful series of postwar children’s fantasy novels as a career boost. Instead he gets his face rubbed in the fact that his great-grandmother is only recorded as an indigent madwoman, and the famous author was born in a sanitarium. That the famous Underhill stories were, in fact, based in large part on delusions told as childhood fables and family histories.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the stories turn out to be less delusional than previously reported. Bodie is in quick succession accosted by a faun, approached by a suspicious PI, and kidnapped by a surprisingly moneyed fan-club-cum-occult-coven. Soon enough he’s getting his first taste of Underhill first hand – or, at least, what’s left of it after a century and change of economizing and entropy.

I’m on record as being fairly dismissive about the whole category of ‘stories about stories’, and I guess I need to eat my words a bit because I actually really enjoyed this. To an extent that’s probably just because it doesn’t get too meta – storyland is a work of deliberate artifice, the stories themselves don’t shape the world or do magic, it just generally never tries to get too cute or didactic about it – but still. This is a book where the hero at one point describes his situation as ‘Five Nights at Aslan’s’ so there’s no real principled distinction for me to cut here. One of the main characters is literally a folklorist.

Though, it’s less about stories than one specific story in particular. The unremarkable schlub plucked out of their mundane life and told that they’re special, that they’re the hero or the true heir and possess some inherent numinous essence that makes them the most important person in the world. This is a terribly appealing story, and one Harry feels the lure of very keenly – he’s self-aware enough to say quite clearly that he goes back to the frozen, decaying world full of half-dead monsters less out of morality or rationality than simply because it was a place where he mattered, for good or ill.

It’s probably not reading too deeply into the book’s themes to note that the story is a lure in a fairly literal sense, or that the true heir is destined to ‘save’ the world by being hollowed out and possessed by those who came before them.

Of course as much as this is in conversation with Narnia et al, it owes at least as much to whole genre of ‘what is nostalgic children’s property, but fucked up?’ creepypasta. Fairyland is choked with fungal growths and creepy, staticy not-snow. The scampering, troublemaking faun is miserable and worn out with bad knees. The Best Of All Dogs is a rotting, terrifying hellhound. There’s even a titanic evil scary clown. Aesthetically the book owes far more to r/nosleep than Lewis Carroll.

Harry himself is an absolute delight as a main character. By which I mean he just sucks so bad, but in very mundane and endearing ways. Who among us can not relate on some level to a failing middle-aged actor who always made a point of not trading on his family name but is secretly pretty resentful it hasn’t helped him more? He refuses the call to adventure then decides his life’s kind of shit and he’d rather get stabbed to death by goblins, so he comes crawling back and begs for a second chance. He’s left a glowing magic sword that will defeat all enemies, but it’s stuck in the body of one of his kidnappers so he just runs screaming and it spends the rest of the book in an evidence locker somewhere. I love him.

I really have no idea to what degree it was intentional, but it also does rather muse me that – okay, you know the standard bit of feminist media analysis where male characters are the actors, while female characters are generally walking set decoration and plot devices? It really deeply amuses me that Harry spends the better part of the story as a magical blood bank getting led around or terrified and awaiting rescue, whereas Seitchman (our counterfeit PI/folklorist) repeatedly forces herself into things through obsessive research skills and a complete disregard for her own safety (and at one point an enthusiastic if unpracticed willingness to sword people). Though to be clear this was mostly amusing to me because it was absolutely never highlighted or commented upon.

This is probably the first book I’ve read that’s recent enough to be set during lockdown without really being a COVID novel, if that makes sense? You could set this the year before or the year after without really losing much, and it lacks the ‘this was written in quarantine’ vibe of a lot of books I read last year. But it definitely adds a sense of specificity and timeliness to it that I rather enjoyed.

So yeah, do not open it expecting anything like Children of Time, but good book!

#book review #and put away childish things #adrian tchaikovsky #sff #urban fantasy #novella

[matrose]

Dr. Avrana Kern, loosely inspired by Mucha. i made an ant brush on procreate just for her:)

#art #avrana kern #children of time #adrian tchaikovsky #bugs cw

[ayeforscotland]

Just finished Children of Time - what a fucking book, honestly outstanding.

#ayeforscotland #adrian tchaikovsky #children of time

[beholdingslut]

demon: my master wants me to ruin you so i'm going to enchant you to force you to have sex with me and break your priestly vows

yasnic [heard the words 'force you to have sex with me' and got so hard he got nauseous]: i think i hauve covid

#adrian tchaikovsky youve done it again. truly #house of open wounds #mp3 #adrian tchaikovsky

[crowreys-wormstache]

One of these days Adrian Tchaikovsky is gonna drop a novel about sentient spacefaring leeches and for about 600 pages I'm gonna be forced to care about those bastard creatures and I'm gonna LIKE IT

#children of time #its been a year since i finished that one #and about a week since i finished #children of ruin #now i love octopi #but the huge spiders? the bodysnatching bacteria? #Tchaikovsky has a knack for changing your entire mindset towards a critter at least temporarily #i hear the third book is about corvids and i dread to ask what the secondary sentience is this time #These of We fucked me up SEVERELY #Frankly I'll be avoiding CoM for a while cuz i dont wanna spend time with a character whose sentence is in part the These Of We #FUCK those guys #kudos to Tchaikovsky the These Of We are terrifying #but also FUCK THEM SO HARD THEY'RE TERRIFYING #adrian tchaikovsky #science fiction #books #jess talks

[azures-grace]

Realizing other people have read the Children of Time series fills me with so much joy.

If you've read that book PLEASE rb this so I have people to talk to about it. I'm so normal about it.

#children of time #adrian tchaikovsky #just finished Children of Ruin last night. i will never recover

[nekoprankster218]

props to Children of Ruin for turning the phrase “going on an adventure” into something terrifying and subsequently executing the rare text-based jumpscare with it

#children of ruin #children of time #children of time trilogy #children of trilogy #adrian tchaikovsky #my post #my posts #idk if this trilogy will ever get an adaptation #but the whole Baltiel storyline of this one would def make a good horror standalone

[faronv2]

been reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

#children of time #adrian tchaikovsky #sci fi

[approximateknowledge]

thinking about the implications of artifabian

kern's a guy but only as a spider

good for him

#ak goes insane #children of ruin #children of time #adrian tchaikovsky #avrana kern #artifabian #anyone here read these books? (screaming into the void)

[pluurankeli]

#adrian tchaikovsky #science fiction #illustration #fan art #children of time

[beegoould]

The raccoons weren’t having a good time of it on Rourke, but they lasted long enough to breed more raccoons who would continue not to enjoy themselves very much - which was evolution’s end game after all.

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

#adrian tchaikovsky #children of memory

[literary-illuminati]

'guy loses a month and change in faerieland, comes back in the middle of COVID lockdown, spends a considerable amount of time wondering if he fucked up and ended up in some kind of alternate nightmare world' is actually a pretty great bit ngl.

#and put away childish things #adrian tchaikovsky #sff #tht

[matrose]

i have four other pages to this but they’re basically just lains jokes

look at more of her though:)

#art #children of time #adrian tchaikovsky #i guessss what else is there to tag #whos gonna be searching any character tags for this tiny little fandom #also i went back into the text and realized she was supposed to hav a strict bun atp whih dows work better for her but also. i love the #ponytail look ok!!! plus i shall not go back and edit everything sorry