Adrian Tchaikovsky has made a career of being a workhorse in science fiction, a very prolific writer who’s garnered a lot of attention and awards for his space opera series. Now, he’s delving into the comics realm for the first time, and he sat down with Fandom Pulse to talk about his new graphic novel.
Salvation’s Child just dropped through ComiXology Originals and is sitting at number one on Amazon’s fantasy graphic novel chart. It’s also your debut in the medium after a career of novels. What made this the right project to break into comics on, rather than adapting Children of Time or Shadows of the Apt?
AT: Whilst I’d love to return to the world of Shadows of the Apt, those books were a while ago (2008-2013 or thereabouts) and Children of Time is a trickier setting to tell new stories in that are meaningful to the main narrative. The Final Architecture is a setting that has a lot of fun moving parts, and the main novels only touched a fraction of what’s there. Plus the books are recent and we had the extra fun of Sophia Aldred being the narrator, and happy for us to use her likeness.
The story is set in the aftermath of the Architects destroying Earth. Was there always a “what was it actually like in the refugee years” story you wanted to tell, or did the comic format pull that out of you?
AT: This was always a part of the story I was aware of, but the timeframe of the books only allowed fleeting mentions. There are a variety of parts of the Architects universe I didn’t get the chance to properly delve into but this time period was definitely the biggest one.
Cosmic Lighthouse is a new outfit founded by Paul Cornell, Lee Harris, and Anthony Cronin. Cornell, who edited Salvation’s Child, is one of the most respected comic writers working. What was it like having Cornell as your editor on your first comic, and what did he teach you about the medium that prose hadn’t?
AT: Paul has been a godsend to a novelist wanting to break into comics writing. The two media are very different, and I had to make a lot of shifts of process to turn out a story fit for a graphic novel, especially cutting down on my usual (wordy) style. As Paul is himself a novelist as well as a comics writer, it’s something he was very aware of and able to communicate.
Writing prose, you control everything from pacing to sentence rhythm to the reader’s pause. In comics you’re handing huge chunks of that control to an artist, a colorist, a letterer. What challenges did you face as a writer in a new medium?
AT: Other than the wordiness above, honestly it’s mostly opportunities rather than challenges. It’s a great privilege to have other people bring a setting of mine to life in this way, and I really enjoyed working with Mike and the others to realise it.
There’s a great detail you mentioned in an interview where the Partheni clone soldiers are visually modeled on Sophie Aldred (Doctor Who companion) who has read audiobooks for you and did the introduction to the book. How did you end up working with her in both directions and what was that like?
AT: This was absolutely Paul’s (genius) idea, as he also has a long history writing for page and screen in the Who universe. Sophie originally narrated my novel Doors of Eden, and did a grand job on it, so I was very keen for her to do Architects when it came around. For Salvation’s Child I was delighted to have her (multiply) immortalised in the universe as the face of the Parthenon.
You’ve said working in the medium was “an exciting experience.” Are you planning to do more, and if so, in this universe or somewhere else in your catalog?
AT: I’m already working on another comics project I can’t really talk about – save that it is something new and not an Architects story. I’d love to have another go at the Architects universe as well, and honestly there are plenty of other settings I’ve created that would support this sort of storytelling.
The Final Architecture is space opera in the grand classical sense with moon-sized alien Architects, cyborg insect hive minds, the Partheni, factions and cults and a galactic war. There’s a lineage there that runs back through Iain M. Banks and Peter F. Hamilton to Doc Smith’s Lensman books and the old pulp galactic adventures. How conscious were you of writing in that tradition, and what does classical space opera give you that newer SF subgenres don’t?
AT: I’m very aware of where I fit in the genre most of the time, and what existing ideas I’m fitting a narrative around. As a genre writer you’re always in conversation with past books, because it’s that existing work that expands and creates the ideaspace for new work to inhabit.
Your work consistently builds non-human intelligences that are very non-human in the way they think vs. a lot of SF aliens act as humans in latex. What’s your discipline for keeping yours feeling alien? Do you have any tricks to it?
