With Days Of Shattered Faith (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), author Adrian Tchaikovsky is presenting the third installment of his Tyrant Philosophers series.
But as he explain in the following email interview about this fantastical realism fantasy novel, Faith is hardly the end of this ongoing story…or the last we’ll be hearing from Tchaikovsky this year.
For people who didn’t read the first two books in the Tyrant Philosophers series — City Of Last Chances and House Of Open Wounds —what is this series about, and what kind of a world are these novels set in?
This is a fantasy world inspired more by the 1800s than the Middle Ages: the age of colonialism, revolution, enlightenment, and oppression. Great events are shaking the world — wars, uprisings, and the brutal ideological expansion of the Palleseen (the Tyrant Philosophers of the title) — but the books focus on small individual lives, people trying to survive and prosper against this tumultuous backdrop. They’re specifically written so you can pick up any of the books as a first read, without needing to know the details of what went before, but if you have read the earlier books you’ll recognize characters and references to previous books as a bit of an added bonus.
And then for people who have read City Of Last Chances and House Of Open Wounds, and can thus ignore me writing SPOILER ALERT, what is Days Of Shattered Faith about, and when and where does it take place in relation to Open Wounds?
Days Of Shattered Faith takes place 2 to 3 years after House Of Open Wounds. The big war taking place in that book has recently finished with a costly win for the Palleseen. The book is set in Usmai, a prosperous but troubled nation where the Pals have the barest toe-hold. The Pal ambassador, Angilly, has done her best for her nation during the war, but has also become extremely attached to her new home, and to its heir apparent. Now the Pals are coming to recoup the costs of the war, and she finds her loyalties caught between the two.
When it relation to writing City Of Last Chances and House Of Open Wounds did you come up with the plot for Days Of Shattered Faith, and what inspired it?
I always write books about the world first; the characters and events arise organically out of the decisions I make regarding the setting. This is especially true of this series, where I don’t plan the plot at all. I have a start-point, with characters and tensions already in place, and then I just follow them and see where they lead.
Whilst writing Open Wounds I gained a greater sense of the world that the Pals and Loruthi were squabbling over, and it was clear that just marching in with batons and boots wasn’t the only way that the Pals would operate. There would be whole branches of their service dedicated to diplomacy and dirty tricks, and there would also be areas of the world where they were present, but not a power yet. I also gained a lot of inspiration from the Empire podcast, which ran a detailed series on the East India Company’s skullduggery in India that created British colonial occupation there, and just as City Of Last Chances was heavily influenced by the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Days Of Shattered Faith was informed by what is, in the UK, a badly under-known period of history.
Days Of Shattered Faith, like City Of Last Chances and House Of Open Wounds, is a fantasy story. But is it a kind of fantasy story, like an epic fantasy or a grimdark fantasy?
I’ve actually been thinking about the parameters of a new subgenre territory where the series fits. There is a particular slice of fantasy, that has permeable borders with grimdark and various others, but is a distinct thing in itself. Settings where the fantastical elements are commonplace and a part of everyday life for the people of that world (rather than being hidden and unusual), but where the plots follow those characters’ relatively humble aspirations (rather than focusing on kings and archmages and the Big Politics of it all.) So we have China Mieville’s Bas-Lag books, say, and Jeff Noon and Steve Beard’s Gogmagog, Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris Cycle, Premee Mohamed’s Siege Of Burning Grass, and K.J. Bishop’s Etched City. Even some of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium stories, and perhaps I might even cite Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast as the earliest example. High magic but low stakes. Fantastical Realism has been suggested to me as a label for it.
So, who do you see as being the biggest influences on the Tyrant Philosophers series, and are there any writers who influenced Days Of Shattered Faith but not City Of Last Chances and House Of Open Wounds?
There’s definitely a big historical influence, and there’s definitely some 19th century literature in the mix: Hugo, and a bit of Dickens. Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and VanderMeer’s Shriek and Finch are also definitive influences, in creating that high-weirdness world where the weird is just normal for its inhabitants.
For Faith in particular I think it’s more that the historical influences shift: the fantastical literature feeding into the series is the same, and the world is readily recognizable as continuous between books.
How about such non-literary influences as movies, TV shows, or games? Did any of those things have a big influence on Days Of Shattered Faith?
Honestly, board games have a bit of a dodgy history when it comes to depictions of colonialism. Best to avoid those as influences, except maybe for Spirit Island.
I think there is a certain strain of table-top role-playing games that fit very nicely with the series — to the extent that I’d love to see a Forged In The Dark or Spire-style game made for the setting, for example.
As far as TV shows, I think Arcane and Andor are probably the big ones. I think I watched both either during or shortly after writing City, and they definitely chimed with the series.
As we’ve been discussing, Days Of Shattered Faith is the third book in the Tyrant Philosophers series. But as you alluded to earlier, Shattered Faith is not the third part of a larger saga. Instead, the Tyrant Philosophers novels are stand-alone but loosely connected stories.
That’s the idea.
Currently the plan is for 5 novels, plus at least two shorter volumes, but honestly the setting is so much fun to write for that I might just keep going if people like it. I’m vaguely planning a return to the city of the first book for book 5, so we’ll see if I can make that one as independent as the others.
Basically the setting is continuous, and there are those big geopolitical events that play out sequentially over the series, but in each book the characters have their own goals and concerns, and mostly they’re just trying to get out from under any larger plot.
Given that, what will people get out of Days Of Shattered Faith if they’ve already read Last Chances and Open Wounds that they wouldn’t otherwise?
The Easter egg stuff is definitely in there. There are characters (re)introduced who you’ll recognize, if you’ve read previous books. Not, I hope, in a way that means readers who don’t know them will be left with that nagging feeling of incompleteness, as if the scourge of a lot of long running franchises. Just enough to join some non-essential dots and get a little bit more context and perspective out of the world.
Now, along with Days Of Shattered Faith, you have another novel either out now or out soon, depending where you live: Shroud, which is already available in the U.K., and out in the U.S. on June 3rd. What is Shroud about, and when and where is it set?
Shroud is a far future hard sci-fi novel about planetary exploitation and exploration on an incredibly hostile moon: high gravity, dense atmosphere, freezing temperatures, and no light. And yet it has a thriving ecosystem, all of which communicates and senses using radio waves, so that if you were, say, luckless enough to crash land on it, there’s no way you can signal your ship to let them know you’re still alive…
Shroud sounds like a sci-fi space opera novel, though I could also see it having a bit of space horror as well. How do you describe it, genre-wise?
The fact that the two protagonists are stuck in such a terrible place, with a clock on how long they have and how far they can travel before their vehicle breaks down, adds a kind of horror, as does the frankly horrific life of Shroud, which is nasty in a variety of ways. The definition of space opera varies a lot, but in my humble option it’s a hard science fiction survival novel. The grim realities of Shroud preclude the sort of heroics that space opera normally runs on.
Along with Shroud, you have another sci-fi novel coming out June 3rd, Bee Speaker, which is the third book in your Dogs Of War series. What is that series about, when and where are those novels set, and then what is Bee Speaker about, and when does it take place in relation to the previous installment, Bear Head?
Dogs Of War was set in the near future, where the future of war is bioengineered animal soldiers. Over the course of that book Rex, the protagonist, slips his leash, discovers free will and goes on a journey about rights, responsibilities, and how we treat our tools and weapons.
Bear Head, the second book, is set a generation later, where Earth politics is declining but the first colonial efforts on Mars are ongoing using both animal and human Bioforms.
Bee Speaker takes place several generations later, after Earth society has collapsed into localized barbarism, but Mars has held on to a higher standard of technology and is now sending a first crewed mission over to the old home world to see what pieces can be picked up.
Across all these books, one common character is Bees, a distributed insect intelligence that started off as a soldier in Rex’s squad but has grown and grown into something complex and other.
Bee Speaker sounds like it might be a climate fiction story as well as a science fiction one. Is that fair to say?
It occurs after a multi-axis collapse, which definitely includes climate, but the post-collapse world isn’t dominated by climate concerns. It’s definitely in there, but by this point the ship has sailed. Bee Speaker is simultaneously a post-apocalyptic story about human society in the ruins (heavy influence: A Canticle For Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.) and a space exploration story flipped on its head, because the Martians are coming to explore the hostile ruins of Earth.
As if Shroud, Days Of Shattered Faith, and Bee Speaker weren’t enough, you also have a novella coming October 14th called Lives Of Bitter Rain, which is part of the Tyrant Philosophers series like Days Of Shattered Faith. What is Bitter Rain about, and when is it set in relation to Shattered Faith and the other Tyrant Philosophers stories?
Yes I do rather have a lot on at the moment!
Lives Of Bitter Rain is the first novella-length offering in the Tyrant Philosophers setting, and originated as me wanted to write a few vignettes so I could get an idea of Angilly, the main character of Shattered Faith, because she has more of a role than any single character in the previous books. In perhaps the most on-brand piece of business ever, when I’d finished with these “just a couple of little flash fiction pieces” I had an entire novella taking her from her early life all the way to where Faith begins. It’s not required reading for Faith in any way (it was required writing for it), but it gives a lot of world detail about how the Pals do espionage, and we also meets a few familiar characters in guest roles.
Shroud, Days Of Shattered Faith, Bee Speaker, and Lives Of Bitter Rain all follow the two very different sci-fi novels you put out last year: Service Model and Alien Clay [which you can read more about here and here, respectfully]. How, if at all, do you think your work is affected by working in different genres, and on different kinds of novels within those genres? Like, did writing Alien Clay have an influence on how you wrote Bee Speaker or did something you did in Shattered Faith lead you to change something in Shroud?
Honestly, I am currently in the extremely fortunate position of being able to write almost anything I’d like, and most likely someone would publish it. I really enjoy that freedom to be able to skip around the genre map without having to show my passport at the borders.
And yes, I’m sure everything I write is going to influence everything I will write after it, if only because I need to make sure I’m not repeating myself too much, but I let my subconscious manage that.
Going back to Days Of Shattered Faith, I asked earlier if it had been influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think it — and, by extension the Tyrant Philosophers series — could work as a series of movies, a TV show, or a game?
I think you’d need to invest a lot of time for a series (and series would definitely be the format) but if you had the budget — or maybe Arcane-style animation — you could make a great show out of it (and I’ve posted a few casting calls up on the website from time to time!).
I also feel, as I mentioned earlier, it’s ripe for a tabletop RPG, which seems to be more within my ability to make happen right now.
Finally, if someone enjoys Days Of Shattered Faith, and they’ve already read City Of Last Chances and House Of Open Wounds, which of your other fantasy novels would you suggest they check out?
I think they fit tonally with Redemption’s Blade, which I wrote a while back. But of course there’s also Shadows Of The Apt (10 books, 4 collections), my very first fantasy work, which also has a lot of fantasy espionage, empire-building, and world detail.
