Adrian Tchaikovsky Audiobooks

Alien minds taken seriously, from the Children of Time sequence to Shroud

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

4 listener ratings

Who is Adrian Tchaikovsky?

Adrian Tchaikovsky – born Adrian Czajkowski in June 1972, the spelling adjusted for his book covers – is a British fantasy and science fiction author with a naturalist’s eye. Heavily influenced by the natural world, his books return again and again to artificial intelligence and genuine alienness, often explored through non-human characters: a signature that has become his calling card.

He made his name with the Shadows of the Apt series, then cemented it with the Children of Time sequence, which carried off the 30th Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016 for its opening volume and went on to win a Hugo Award. Fellow author James Lovegrove praised it as superior stuff for the brio with which it tackled the big themes: gods, messiahs, artificial intelligence and alienness. The awards have kept accumulating, and so has the sense that Tchaikovsky is one of British science fiction’s essential figures.

Adrian Tchaikovsky in audiobooks

Tchaikovsky’s great subject – minds utterly unlike our own – is precisely what a long, immersive listen can make vivid. Children of Ruin extends the thinking of his award-garlanded Children of Time books: artificial intelligence and true alienness treated with complete intellectual seriousness, while Shroud offers another route into his imagination. His grounding in the natural world gives his creations a credibility most science fiction never approaches; these are ecosystems, not costumes.

For UK listeners, he is among the most reliably ambitious science fiction writers working in Britain today, and audio’s slow burn suits the scale of his ideas perfectly.