Adrian Tchaikovsky's Blog, page 24

New post under construction

Yes, yes, after hearing Adam Christopher wax lyrical about the importance of regular updates, I swore I'd get at least one entry a week in, and lo! I have missed it. However, there's a good reason. I was all set to do a spot about the return of thieves in fantasy, using Scott Lynch, Douglas Hulick and David Tallerman as examples (1) and then someone dropped a copy of Polansky's Straight Razor Cure on me, so I should probably finish reading that before attacking that particular topic. Anyway, soon.

(1) of authors, not of thieves.

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Heirs of the Blade — further reading.

Keen-eyed readers may have noticed that Heirs of the Blade brings in a number of characters previously seen in the short stories on this site. This is obviously because of my immense skill in foreshadowing and plotting ahead and not at all because several of those characters just wouldn't leave me alone until they got a serious piece of the action. Anyway, for those wishing to get up to speed, the following is recommended reading. There are no spoilers in these stories, and as they were written ahead of Heirs, while they would work just as well as a retrospective, if you're currently sitting with an unread copy to hand you might want to troll through these first.

Varmen the Sentinel, of course, has his early history played out in Ironclads and The Last Ironclad.

Dal Arche and his little coterie of brigands first meet in An Old Man in a Harsh Season and another of their adventures is told in The Price of Salt.

Lowre Cean has a relatively small role in The Sun of the Morning, but his son, Lowre Darien, who gets some mention in Heirs, has his exploits told in The Prince.

Finally, the ghost story told by Avaris the Spider, towards the end of the book, can be found in its entirety here: The Dreams of Avaris

Enjoy!

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Desperate fights require desperate measures

Firstly, thank you to everyone who turned up to the signings at Reading and London.

Secondly, I have reached a point in book 9 where I am faced with a phenomenally complicated skirmish between about a dozen named and distinct characters, and below, as an insight into the writer's mind, is my visual aid to help me keep track of it all:

Sad, I know.

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Oxford and Leeds signings and more reviews

Another post! What do I think this is, Twitter? Anyway, the signing mills are grinding somewhat faster these days so this is really an upd

Hmm. Just as well this isn't twitter. Can't be brief to save my life (1).

Anyway, an update of the last one — so grand Heirs of the Blade tour is now:

Friday 14th October (vis: tomorrow) 6-8pm Reading Waterstones (Oracle one)

Saturday 15th October, 1-2pm, London Forbidden Planet

Possibly Saturday 12th November Leeds Travelling Man — TBC

Saturday 19th November, 12-2pm Oxford Waterstones

Friday 16th December 12-2pm  Leeds Waterstones.

In addition, together with the  review of Heirs of the Blade from LEC Book Reviews, I'm happy to see that Liviu has put a review up at Fantasy Book Critic and still likes the series, so all good there.

(1) Just look at the page counts.

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Event news revised — and first review for Heirs of the Blade

The Reading signing, this Friday 14th at 6-8pm, will be at the Oracle shopping centre Waterstones, not the Broad Street one I've been at before (1). Saturday's threeway signathon at Forbidden Planet, London, 1-2pm is still on as advertised.

I will also be signing somewhat festively at the Leeds Waterstones 12–2 on Friday the 16th December this year, if you're more north-oriented (3). Oxford signing still being arranged.

Lastly, I see today that LEC Book Reviews has got in with an early and pleasant review of Heirs of the Blade (4).

(1) Don't know if this is because it's a Friday or because of vicious inter-store politics. (2)

(2) Backstage, as it were, in the Broad Street Waterstones in Reading — the bits only the staff get to see — was an experience. Everywhere there were motivational posters with Mr Men on them, exhorting the staff to remember various items of shop policy. It was like a fascist state run by Roger Hargreaves.

(3) which should be an oxymoron.

(4) and not Heirs of the Balde as I constantly mistype.

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The most asked question

Mark Charan Newton, author of the excellent Legends of the Red Sun series has a clip and a muse on the great question almost every author gets at one time or another (1): Where do ideas come from.

That got me thinking. Technically, my published long fiction to date represents only a single set of initial ideas — that's the advantage of a series. The original elements of Shadows of the Apt turned up in the early 90's when I ran something that looked a little like the current Insect-kinden setting as an RPG at university. Looking back, it's quite surprising just how much of that original campaign actually made it into print. For example you would probably recognise:

(Some minor spoilers for the early books)

1. The map of the Lowlands from book 1, that ispretty much the same as the one I actually used for the campaign.

2. Stenwold and Tisamon as major NPCs going under those very names (though no 'Maker' for Stenwold, I think). Stenwold was just an artificer, not a statesman, but Tisamon the Weaponsmaster hasn't changed all that much, as we see him in Empire.

3. Scuto and Kymene in something quite close to their final forms, but not those names, and indeed the plotline of Kymene as a prisoner of a fat Wasp governor of Myna was played out in the campaign, so I suppose poor old Ulther is one of my original cast too. Scylla was also there, with her face-changing tricks, although primarily as a thief and not a spy.

4. The Darakyon, very much as seen in Empire.

5. Drephos, sort of. The campaign never actually got that far, but a crazy half-Moth artificer with an unusual arm was planned as a later villain.

6. Snapbows, again sort of, although they never got into wide circulation in the game.

7. The Shadow Box, its theft (thought from somewhere else entirely), and an auction in Jerez where it would end up.

8. The grand majority of the kinden found in the books. I even have some thoroughly dreadful concept art from the time. (2)

9, The Scorpion mercenary that Thalric fights alongside the Wasp sycophants in the governor's palace at Myna. I know that's ridiculously specific for a character that doesn't even have a name, but one of aforementioned pieces of art was that guy.

The precise tech level, politics and starting status quo got firmed up a lot for the books, but having developed the world for the game I had a very well-rounded understanding of the world which proved invaluable in writing. A lot of other elements, such as Lake Limnia and its contents, were sort of waiting in the wings. The actual plot itself just evolved out of the world — once I had worked out my starting point everything fell into place — and has continued to fall into place, domino to domino, ever since. I take pains not to get underfoot, really, whilst my characters drive the plot between them, war and angst and all.

There is still a great deal of planning, replanning and going at the whole business with a spanner and a fire-axe, in order to make narrative sense of the train of ideas that flow naturally from the previous books, but within the series, simple causality, the inherent logic (3) of the setting and the pre-existing dispositions of the characters determine a great deal of what will happen next.

Of course, providence willing, there will come I time when the book I am advancing across the chessboard (4) will not be an insect-kinden one. I'm working on book 9 of 10 at the moment, and so my thoughts are naturally turning to the future, and what the next project will be, assuming anyone is insane enough to let me. Whilst I do intend to return to the world of the kinden in time (5) I'd like to visit elsewhere for a while — and that will be an interesting step given that I've lived in the one world, with the one set of characters for so long. The ideas are coming, though, and have been for some time (6) — but where do they come from?

Having now got to the point in this post where I intended to actually begin, and to follow up Mr Newton's own post, I find I have gone on far too long. Another time, perhaps.

(1) No, not 'why isn't this available where I live.'  That is a good question though, and particularly annoying to have to ask it.

(2) I also have some rather better concept art from when I was planning Sea Watch, which may even see the light of day.

(3) Giant insects, mad clockwork flying machines and people who can fly notwithstanding.

(4) The chessboard of mixed metaphors, that is.#

(5) As further evidence of my insanity I would state that I have at least three books of extra story not connected to the current arc.

(6) And believe me, it's imperative that you always write them down. I've lost at least a couple of book plots from imperfect recollection later on.

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Minsc, Might and Morrowind

The Eye of the Beholder fond mockathon I did a while back started the memories flowing regarding computer RPGs (of the single rather than the MMO (1) variety) that I've had fun with. Now Fantasycon's gone and the Reading and London signings are still coming up, here are a few that I recall having some real fun with back in the day. There will be all sorts of spoilers. The images below are all from the Gamespot reviews, which I hope is in order.

Might and Magic VII

Apparently there is a continuous plot to these Might and Magic games, but as I only played this one, and then one from earlier in the series about a year later, er… ok, it looks about as comprehensible as Final Fantasy when you start to read up about it, but Lord knows (a) I didn't know any backstory before starting, and (b) I don't honestly think it was needed. The Might and Magic are the same sort of "four guys in a car" party-based RPGs, so your characters exist only as little portraits of people (2) who all skate about the world in magical unison until they get eaten by one of a variety of 2D monsters in various colours (3).  I played this game sort of in tandem with a friend (4) which was lucky, as MM7 has a moral choice moment, and you either end up helping the bad guys take over the world (me) or helping the good guys save it (him). The chief difference is that one region was basically Mexico full of goblins (5) with an underworld of undead, and another area was a floating cloud city full of wizards with an even cloudier upperworld full of angels. Your moral choice dictated where you no longer got invited to… and which place you got to seriously stomp once you'd levelled up. Combat could be either live or turn based, and there was this absurdly dramatic chord when you went into turn by turn, and a similar one for when you finished the fight, and believe me, you would be hearing those sounds in your sleep soon enough.

The MM games were filled to the brim with secret areas, games within games and all sorts of crazy stuff. You could make stuff, mix potions, turn yourself invisible and raid the treasure vaults of your supposed allies, get horribly lost in a teleport-trapped dwarven tomb and decode weird clues so that on one day of the year you could be in the right place to kill a rare monster, and even… guns? And a spaceship? Wait, what…?

You have to remember that the number of fantasy RPGs that are actually pure fantasy RPGs are really very small. If it's not steampunk, it's ancient elder civilisation, and if it's not that it's out and out SF elements. The MM plotline somehow ended with a bunch of aliens turning up in fantasyland and crashing their spaceship, and the two plots both lead to you teleporting back there and fighting your way through the killer robots to either (a) destroy the ship so that it cannot be used for evil, or (b) use the ship for evil by — wait for it — stealing the photocopier key. Hell yes. Along the way you pick up a selection of laser guns, which do low damage but have an insane rate of fire and no ammo requirement and…

Well, remember you're four guys in a magic cart? Once your wizard gets spiffy enough, that cart can fly.

In a nutshell, this is why MM7, and its predecessors (I have a feeling the flying thing got actually taken out in later ones) were so much fun) — and especially in this one when your gallant fantasy aviators could zoom over the very simple landscape armed to the teeth with laser rifles and strafing madly at anything in sight — and almost everything could shoot back, so you had epic wheeling dogfights with acid-spitting hydras and the like, and the game just basically said, all that stuff you've learned over several hours of gameplay? Throw it out now, for you will never cast another spell or swing a sword again.

Wizardry 8

The most recent "guys in an invisible cart" game, this was decidedly up on MM7 in the graphics department, although again the story got somewhat lost because I wasn't paying attention to the opening cinematic and hadn't played the previous 7 games. However, this game also starts with a spaceship crashing into fantasyland, with the added bewilderment of your band of stock fantasy heroes having been on the spaceship, even though you're all armed with swords and bows and fireball spells. This becomes a theme relatively quickly when you meet the three other spacegoing races apparently fighting for control of the planet and the high-tech maguffins that have been lost there. One lot are a galactic empire who mostly rely on blunderbuss-level tech, and the Dark Savant (main bad guy) has a legion of robot soldiers who have no ranged weapon capacity at all.

Wizardy 8's gameplay was further enlivened by a punishingly arbitrary approach to difficulty levels, which played to an insane double standard. Fixed monsters, including the Dark Savant's aforementioned robots, did not change over time, so that every visit to the conquered main city it became easier and easier to swan through the robot respawns until they — the game's main threat — were utterly trivial. In contrast, random wandering monsters seemed to scale to a difficulty level somewhere 5–10 levels above that of your party, so that odds on any encounter with bandits or roving wildlife would end with the entire party massacred, especially if they surrounded you. You'd get out of bed, give the Dark Savant's troops a kicking, and then venture forth with your monster detector on, and hide in a crevice the moment you saw any red dots coming.

Baldur's Gate

Possibly one of the most famous RPGs of all time, and the first in the list where you actually got to see your characters, I won't go into much detail about what it was like because most people will have played it — and if you haven't, think  Dragon Age, which is very much its spiritual successor (and which I'll make some notes on at some point). You wander about a 2D landscape that mockingly mimics a 3D landscape by having areas roped off that you can't get to, and there's some plot about a… honestly, I can't remember. It's another Dungeons and Dragons game, though, and there were plenty of follow ups, including a direct sequel and couple under the Icewind Dale monicker, and they were all good. You start with a single character and pick up others, and then it does something really quite remarkable, because there's this guy called Minsc. Minsc is a Russian-sounding ranger who has a hamster called Boo that he thinks can talk (and fight — "Go for the eyes, Boo!") but he's also one of the handier combat characters in the game, and very useful to have around when he isn't mind-controlled. The hamster, by the way, is actually an item in his inventory, and he won't let you take it away. Minsc joins you because there's this girl he wants rescuing from gnolls, but he'll happily hack the crap out of anything you point him at, and he has the best lines in the game ("Magic is impressive, but now Minsc leads! Swords for everyone!"). And then, after you've blithely ignored his occasional poke about going to rescue this girl of his, he goes berserk and has to be put down. And then you scrabble desperately back through all your save games, and lose untold game progress, in order to find one where you can go rescue her from the gnolls in time, because by that point you really like Minsc (6). This is the first time I ever ran into a character in a computer game that inspired any kind of emotional response. The writers/game creators had made a person, a real NPC that you cared about, and who made you laugh. Again, this presages Dragon Age, where that kind of party interaction is one of the main points, but it was a feat seldom equalled.

Baldur's Gate is also notable at doing its damndest to bring the D&D rules to the computer and getting it wrong a few times along the way. There was this one point in the plot where some evil doppelgangers were going to gatecrash some royal function and kill the local noble. They were said to be hiding in the sewers, but although I ran into all manner of other nasties down there (7) I could never find them, and whilst I could beat them up, what I couldn't do was stop them killing the king/duke/whatever before I'd finished them. So I sat my party outside the room they were all in — courtiers and doppelgangers, knowing that nobody would be starting the party without me, and I considered my options. What I did have in hand was an entire bagfull of wands of summoning that would dispense random monsters wherever I pointed. Delightfully, nobody in the duke's audience chamber batted an eyelid when I dropped a half-dozen gnolls next to the throne. Then some wolves, and hobgoblins, and… basically I filled that room to bursting with monsters of all shapes and sizes, all of them natural foes to mankind if you met them in the wild. Nobody cared. Possibly the servants even offered them drinks. Then I walked in and all hell broke loose. The doppelgangers switched forms, and every summoned monster in the room descended on them with tooth and claw and a sock with a rock in it. My computer slowed down to about one frame a minute. I went and made some tea. About an hour later the doppelgangers were dead, the duke was alive, and everyone had decided never, never to mention the Day the Monsters Came.

Morrowind

Another game that most people will have played (8), and so I won't bother with the detail. Morrowind didn't have a Minsc, but what it did have was plot and world in spades — this was the first game I ever really got absorbed in playing to the extent that I was right there in my character's skull wanting to know what was going on — and when you found out what was going on it was absolutely worth the journey. This carried over into Tribunal, the first sequel (Bloodmoon not so much, as the plot was far more separate) and indeed it sort of made more sense to cut the Morrowind plot in the middle, go do all of Tribunal and then go back. The basic setup was that you had three gods, or godlike beings, and a fallen god bad guy, and a prophecy, all that jazz, but it was a genuinely epic voyage of discovery and (spoilers!) when in Tribunal you find the fate of one of the gods (in whose religion you may actually be quite involved) and when you discover the nature of the others… Also, even though the graphics weren't a patch on the later Oblivion, the world was awesome, and populated by weird monsters rather than the usual fantasy fare (when I first saw one of the big floating tentacle-monsters it scared the crap out of me — and then I discovered that they were basically farmed like cattle) (9). And, it was a very open world, and you could ignore the plot completely, and there was an extremely skilled and active modding community that the game openly embraced. The bit where I confronted the Big Bad on the gantry of his death rocket (10) after obtaining the two sacred weapons of waaa that were the only things that could defeat him, and he stepped back and fell to his death almost immediately, we'll chalk up as either anticlamax or extreme realism.

(1) Though you know this chain of posts is going there.

(2) In the earlier part of the game, often little portraits of dead people.

(3) Those old pre-Quake graphics, eh?

(4) Same guy who was getaway driver for Eye of the Beholder.

(5) It was Mexico. It was a desert full of cactus and, I think, even had vaguely hispanic music. It couldn't have been more Mexico if the goblins had been wearing sombreros.

(6) If you mistakenly rescue the girl before you pick up Minsc then Minsc won't register it, and in fact will be irreconcilably berserk and merrily kill her, sadly.

(7) The lot of a sewer-worker's life in fantasyland is well chronicled.

(8) The new one, Skyrim, is out any day now, I think. I did try Oblivion, but honesty never really got into it.

(9) This is one reason that Oblivion put me off — it was wolves, goblins and bandits, and that, frankly, is just dull.

(10) Technology again — there's a whole elder race/steampunk thing going on in Morrowind.

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Event news and combined map

O-kay, on the back of all that Fantasyconcatenation I have some more confirmed dates for signings. Or at least date.

As well as joining Adam Nevill and Mark Charan Newton at Forbidden Planet on the 15th October, 1-2pm, I shall be in Reading the day before at the Waterstones Bookshop (the one on Broad Street as usual) on the evening of that Friday from 6-8pm. Do come along, spread the word, etc.

Further signings in Oxford, Leeds and possibly elsewhere (maybe Birmingham, as I'm swinging by there — may just sign stock though) — let you know as I have the info.

As against that, the Derby Thing vaguely mooted for 5th November has been unmooted owing to author unavailability, and looks likely to be some time early next year — the only info I have for this is that it should be a Tor authors' event — so may be me, Mark Newton, Peter F Hamilton, Paul Cornell, China Mieville and pals. Or none of the above. No idea.

Now, to far more important business. As previously promised, Roderick Easton, occasional poster here, has taken Hemesh Alles' maps and put them together for a complete picture of the world of the Insect-kinden (or at least those parts of it we've seen in the series), which, with great thanks to Mr Easton, I hereby present:

If your browser's like mine you may need to click on it to see it fully.

The Lowlands is really small! Look at it, can you believe the entire first book takes place in that tiny plot of land?

Also, I'm kind of waiting for my father, who teaches Geology at the OU, to tear me off a strip for where the mountains are, or something. But hey…

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Fantasycon 2011 retrospective

Firstly, bloody hell but actually getting home from Fantasycon turned out to be the sort of journey that would have Gandalf and assorted hobbits calling in the eagles sort of early. UK rail services continuing to enact their divine duty to turn the lives of anyone daring to travel on the Sabbath to total crap.

Anyway, Fantasycon — great fun all round. Reading went well (having Joe Abercrombie and Tom Lloyd in the audience was somewhat nerve-racking). The panel "trends in fantasy" went extremely well — the best I've been on — me, Joe and Tom being kept ruthlessly on message by Juliet McKenna — this is the second panel I've been on with Juliet moderating, and she is extremely good at it. And she can kick your ass. No really.

Other than that, I finally got to meet Stephen Hunt, author of The Court of the Air and sequels. I missed him at SFX this year, and he's one of my favourite authors to read, plus the creator of one of the hands down most original secondary worlds currently in play. I also got to meet my new editor at Tor, Bella Pagan, who's just made/is making the move over from Orbit.

Fantasycon is also something of a bonanza for publishers, and there was a profusion of book launches from small presses — including Solaris, PS Publishing, and notably the launch of the new Jo Fletcher Books imprint which, according to what Jo was saying in the publishers and agents' panel, is currently looking to build on its fantasy list. I feel honour-bound to point this out as I did consume a fair quantity of free wine at the launch party.

And Brian Aldiss — interviewed by Christopher Priest who, in any other company would be the one being interviewed. Listening to Mr Aldiss talk about a life remarkably full of incident, both humorous and tragic, made me wonder, should the world ever miscarry sufficiently to put me in a similar position, if I would have anything remotely as worthwhile to say.

Next up — Forbidden Planet signing 5th October, possibly with an associated stop in Oxford or Reading, but not sure yet.

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News and new covers.

It's that time of year, or one of those times of year, when there's basically too much to blog about (1)

First of all, Signings and Events for the near and moderate future now include:

This weekend (30th September-1st October) Fantasycon, Royal Albion Hotel, Brighton. Complete programme here and rather like Alt Fiction earlier on, there's plenty of stuff I simply want to be in the audience for. However, as a gentle reminder:

Friday — mass signing of the authors, 8pm, Regency Lounge

Saturday — "Trends in Fantasy Fiction" panel, 10am, Russell Room

Saturday — My reading slot is at 2pm, room 134 of the hotel — please do come to the reading if you can! I can promise prose the like of which nobody has ever heard. Seriously (2).

However, there are some other shenanigans on the horizon, not least of which is:

Forbidden Planet joint signing at the, er, Forbidden Planet bookshop in London, Saturday 15th October where I will be sitting alongside Adam Nevill and Mark Charan Newton. This is 1-2pm, and it's the first time I've actually got a signing slot in those August halls (3). London, baby! (4)

Some other signings also around that date that have yet to be sorted out but it looks likely that I will be in Reading or Oxford on that Friday 14th October, details to follow very shortly. There should also be a Leeds Waterstones date and one at the Leeds Travelling Man also.

Also, there will be some manner of Alt Fiction offshoot get together on 5th November but that one's still being put together, so if I give you any details I'll… ah, damn. Oh well. Forget I said anything. Probably Derby Quad again, as a venue, given how very supportive Derby is being.

Finally, I have been confirmed for SFX next February, no idea what I'm doing. It's in North Wales.

Now, while I've been blogging about dinosaurs, Alan Brooks has been busy, and I give you:

Tisamon, getting rained on in North Wales Jerez:

and Achaeos before Tharn — and given that I didn't do a Tharn brief, and this is Alan's own research from the books, I'm hugely impressed.

Finally, one reader of this site, the very diligent Roderick Easton, has produced a Unified Map of the Insect-kinden Lands based on the various maps previously posted up, but frankly that deserves a post of its own to showcase it.

(1) and if you look at the gaps between posts you'll surely agree those times ain't too frequent.

(2) offer lasts until the end of the reading, when your having heard it will invalidate this warranty. Terms and conditions may apply. Art-assisted flight can go up as well as down.

(3) Unless you count the time when I basically invented one without telling FP.

(4) A Friends reference, just to show how up to the minute I am.

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