Reading List
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Science Fiction and Fantasy Author
Adrian Tchaikovsky studied zoology and psychology before qualifying as a lawyer, and it is the zoology that shows. His books are built around minds that are not human: the uplifted spiders of Children of Time, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016, and the insect-kinden of the ten-volume Shadows of the Apt. He writes fast and at length, and the question underneath the invention is always what intelligence looks like when it does not arrive in a human shape.
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Extremophile
by Ian Green
“Extremophile is biopunk: the technology it looks at is bioengineering rather than traditional cyberware. But it is a book which absolutely brings that angry resistance to the way the world has gone wrong, which in this case is simultaneously corporate and ecological.” — via Interview, August 2026
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After Atlas
by Emma Newman
“This is actually the second book in a series, but they are very independent and can be read individually. In the first book of the series, there was a great big colony ship called Atlas, which, at the behest of a visionary messiah character, goes off to a planet that everyone is assured they can make a colony of.” — via Interview, August 2026
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The Mountain in the Sea
by Ray Nayler
“This is interesting. Again, we start with: what is the point of the book? And the point of The Mountain in the Sea is that someone discovers a fully sapient octopus civilization. That aspect is not in any way dystopian. And there is also AI, which is a proper AI.” — via Interview, August 2026
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The Windup Girl
by Paolo Bacigalupi
“The windup girl of the title is, to be blunt, essentially a sex-bot who is wandering around feral through a lot of the story.” — via Interview, August 2026