While it may sound like the name of a Paw Patrol-like cartoon about military dogs, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2017 novel Dogs Of War was actually a hard science fiction novel in which the military engineers animals into weapons…including, yes, dogs.
With Tchaikovsky now releasing a second sequel to Dogs called Bee Speaker (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), I spoke to him via email about what inspired and influenced this third book, as well as how it connects to the previous two.
For people who haven’t read the first two books, Dogs Of War and Bear Head, what is the Dogs Of War series about, and when and where are these stories set?
Dogs Of War is set in the near future where, following some serious meltdowns with regular AI / robot military tech, the industry has developed “bioforms” as the future of warfare: uplifted, engineered animals, mostly dogs.
Rex is such a dog, the leader of a multispecies pack including the bear Honey, the lizard Dragon, and Bees, a distributed intelligence swarm of bees. Rex is a good dog doing his master’s bidding, except it becomes clear that his master is a bad man using Rex as a deniable asset to commit war crimes.
When Rex gets cut off from his master, he’s forced to start taking responsibility and making decisions on his own, and working out how to tell right from wrong. His subsequent career, in the war and beyond it, will determine the future rights and existence of Bioforms as a new form of life.
Bear Head is set a generation later, following Honey, an aspiring autocratic politician, and shady dealings over on the site of the first Martian city, where among other things a fugitive Bees has gone to ground.
And then, for those who have read Dogs Of War and Bear Head, and thus can ignore me writing SPOILER ALERT in all caps, what is Bee Speaker about, and when does it take place in relation to Bear Head?
Bee Speaker is set several generations after Bear Head. The stresses on Earth civilization seen in the previous book have finally pushed it past the point of no return, leading to widespread societal collapse. In a weird patchwork post-tech landscape, monks, militia and remnants of old technology jostle for survival.
From their midst, a distress call goes out: a remnant of Bees, desperately seeking help. Over on Mars, the crews and colonists have weathered the collapse better than Earth, and prepare to send a rescue mission. But does their confidence exceed their competence, and is everything as it seems?
When in relation to writing Dogs Of War and Bear Head did you come up with the idea for Bee Speaker, and what gave you the idea for this third book?
When I’d finished Bear Head, I had an idea I wanted to do one more, and the very vague setup for when the book would be set, and the sorts of issues it would look at, came together quite quickly. However, I wasn’t sure that there would be demand (as it happens, it’s a series that, while making a small splash at first, seems to have become a favorite with a lot of readers, for which, thank you!) and only later, when the publishers suggested they’d be very happy with one, did I start to fill in the details.
In Bee Speaker, people from Mars receive a distress call from Earth. Where on Earth does the signal originate, why there, and does it even matter?
I’m intentionally vague as to actually where on Earth the action of the book takes place, but I kind of assumed somewhere in the rural heartland of the U.S. However, enough has collapsed, and enough has been lost, that cultural markers are mostly erased. If can be right next door to wherever you are.
Bee Speaker is clearly a science fiction story, but what kind of sci-fi do you consider it to be?
The Dogs Of War books are definitely a hard sci-fi series, though each book is located at a slightly distinct point on the genre landscape (or indeed moves about within its narrative, so Dogs goes from military near-future through cyberpunk and courtroom drama). Bee Speaker definitely draws from dystopian post-apocalypse tropes, albeit with what I hope are some very new spins on the ideas.
Moving on to the ever-appreciated questions of influence, what are some of the things, literary and not, that influenced Bee Speaker?
So, one of the main factions in the story is the Apiary, a monastic community devoted to preserving knowledge from the old fallen world, and this is pretty much a direct homage to A Canticle For Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., and also to a little segment they did in one episode of Babylon 5 (!) where we see the distant future after Earth civilization has collapsed.
Now, as we’ve been discussing, Bee Speaker is the third book in your Dogs Of War series. And you kind of touched on this, but is it also the last book of a trilogy, the third installment of a four or five book series, or is this an ongoing series?
I have only set out to write an expressly intended series 3 times: Shadows Of The Apt, Echoes Of The Fall, and Final Architecture. The rest of the time I write a book, and if it does well enough and the ideas come, I may write another one in the same setting, and then maybe another. So each book is a self-contained story building on its predecessor, rather than a section or an overarching plot arc.
So I can’t say if there will be a fourth book, but it’s certainly possible.
But while it’s not a definitive trilogy, I think the three books will work when read one after the other, mostly because you’ll get to follow a certain continuity of philosophy, and because that will kind of make the whole thing the story of Bees, who runs through these books like Avrana Kern does through my Children Of Time series.
Head Of Zeus, who are publishing Bee Speaker, will be rereleasing Dogs Of War and Bear Head on March 3rd of next year. Are you going to be adding anything to those reissues, or changing anything about them?
The books are getting some fantastic new cover art to match Bee Speaker [seen above], but the text isn’t going to change.
Now, Bee Speaker is not your only new book. You recently put out Days Of Shattered Faith, which is the third book in your fantasy series the Tyrant Philosophers, while a novella in that series, Lives Of Bitter Rain, comes out October 14th. You have another novel, Shroud, out this week, while your novel The Hungry Gods will be out August 12th. We did a deep dive on Shattered Faith already, but what is Shroud about, and when and where does it take place?
Shroud is either a terrifying survival story on a hostile alien world, or a jolly first contact romp, depending on whether you’re the human or the alien. It’s about two people who get stuck on a world that is antithetical to human life on just about every axis, their incredible trek to safety, and the weird alien life that encounters and accompanies them.
Shroud has people exploring a hostile world, while Bee Speaker has people already living on a planet that was not as hostile towards human life, but still not super amenable. Did writing these stories around the same time influence each other, and did you ever find yourself pulling an element from one and putting it into the other because it fit better?
Honestly, I think I wrote these quite far apart, because these things never line up. In my head, Shroud is a very different story because so much of the prep work was the science — the world, the life, all of that. Bee Speaker is much more interested in the sociology, the different factions and groups and the logic of how they’ve developed post-collapse.
Moving on to The Hungry Gods, what is that novel about, when and where does it take place, and what kind of science fiction story is it?
The Hungry Gods is about a bunch of tech bro billionaires who come back from ruining space to ruin Earth all over again. It’s another post-collapse novel with a very different landscape and social setup. People have lost a great deal more, and the insertion of a quartet of feuding, power-hungry and positively deranged tech-gods seems unlikely to improve things for anyone.
Going back to Bee Speaker, earlier I asked if it had been influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Bee Speaker — and, by extension, the Dogs Of War series — could work as a series of movies, a TV show, or a game?
Honestly, if you had the budget and effects to bring the Bioforms to screen I think that Dogs Of War would make an incredible series. It is honestly one of my most filmable things — the perfect combination of really relatable characters (Rex and Honey especially) with some good solid action and also big sci-fi questions about ethics, science, war, and human nature.
And if that show happened, who would you want them to cast in the main roles?
For main characters, that’s a tough one, and they’d be voice roles, of course. There are plenty of human characters, but they’re all secondary to the Bioforms. For Rex, you need a bruiser who can put over intense angst and vulnerability. For Honey, someone with a good line in sharp highbrow humor. How about [Moon Knight‘s] Oscar Isaacs and [The Crown‘s] Olivia Colman?
So, is there anything else you think potential readers need to know about Bee Speaker and the Dogs Of War series?
I really hope the books speak for themselves. All I should say is that, genuinely, Dogs Of War has always been one of my own favorites, out of my work. I think I pack a great deal of character and world into relatively few (for me) words.
Finally, if someone enjoys Bee Speaker, and they’ve already read the other books in the Dogs Of War series, which of your other sci-fi novels would you suggest they check out next?
I think if people are interested in the animal science side of things then either Children Of Time and its successors, or else Doors Of Eden would be a good match. For the social side and looking at how future human societies might turn out, perhaps The Hungry Gods, or else The Expert System’s Brother.
