Category: Thumb
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Dark Feathered Hearts Out Now…
The Book of the Colossus is now complete with the final volume – Dark Feathered Hearts. “You shut us down in the darkness, you skin people oh so bright beneath your lovely skies. You buried us among the filth and the poison and the old machines and the chemicals.” Max and Abby race against time…
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AntiHelix out now!
Remorseless, vicious and brilliant – General Crysanthe Uella has dedicated her life to ensuring humanity will escape from the embers of a dead universe. But the corrupt lords of a decaying empire have betrayed her, tearing away everything and everyone she ever cared for. She has one last chance to redeem herself – a final…
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Ragged Claws
5 out of 5 – Jane Dougherty, Amazon.com. “This is a wonderful book, a massive canvas of purple and blood red skies, oceans of liquid metal, decomposing cities full of fear and squalor inside the body of God (yup, that’s right), nightmarish beings, and exquisite beauty.” … Read the whole review here. Ragged Claws,…
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Thumb
Reviews of Thumb Adrian Tchaikovsky – Shadows of the Apt “Thumb is a superb book, one that makes the madness work.” Ian Watson “Splendidly strange, vividly original.” 5 out of 5 – ABShepherd, Amazon.com. “A five star rating is a rare thing for me to give no matter how I obtained the book. A book must…
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AntiHelix, nuts and bolts and a writer’s workflow
I’ve finished the first draft of the third volume in the Book of the Colossus quadrilogy, AntiHelix, and put it to one side for a month to pickle. It stands at just over 129,000 words which is the longest piece of work I’ve written so far (though I’ll hack it back to 120,000-ish). I thought…
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Paperhouse (1988)
Movies and dreams have always been closely linked. Cinema history is full of movies of dreams, from the films of Georges Méliès and the 1911 cartoon of Little Nemo in Slumberland to the world of Freddy Kreuger and Nightmare on Elm Street. There are two basic approaches – adding dreams inside films as part of…
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Ragged Claws available on March 16th!
Max and Abby are trapped in the city of Interosseous where the inhabitants navigate through the treacherous streets using the giant faces in the sky. If humanity is to survive Max must contact the Machine Men who live in the Heart and Mind of the Colossus. But the way onward is a deadly maze…
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Ragged Claws Cover Art
The great news is that the manuscript for Ragged Claws is back from my editor, John Jarrold, and ready for the final knocking into shape before release. The book is 99% finished, with just a few minor adjustments and tightening of knots before it gets pushed out to the world. I will announce the release…
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Visualising Ragged Claws in 3D
The first draft of my next novel and sequel to Thumb, Ragged Claws, is now finished and tucked safely in a drawer for a month. It’s hard not to keep re-reading and tinkering, but I know from experience that if you’re not careful you end up reading what’s in your head, not what’s in the…
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Ragged Claws – concept art
The sequel to Thumb.
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Thumb available in paperback!
Thumb is now available in paperback from Amazon, priced $9.99 in the US, £7.99 in the UK and €11.17 in Europe. I confess to being biased but I’m really happy with the quality – the book looks and feels nicer than a lot of standard trade paperbacks. Anyway, the links to buy the book are…
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Thumb – Out Now!
The universe is empty. The stars are dead. The worlds are no more. The last humans struggle to create a god to save them from the utter end. In the shadow of this colossus Max Ocel rescues a beautiful stranger from the clutches of an insane giant, and sets in motion a chain of events that…
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Countdown to Thumb
A flat singularity carried the unfinished body of God through an empty universe. The colossus lay on his back, a being so vast he might easily have put his arms around a world, if any still existed. His left hand rested palm upwards. In the shadow of the Thumb a brass and wooden flying machine…
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German Expressionist Flyer
I’ve been working on some art/visualisation pieces for Thumb. As I mentioned before I wanted to capture the feel of the German Expressionist artists and films of the 1920s and 1930s. The movement grew out of a desire to overturn the established order of nineteenth century Europe, whose triumphalist and Imperial certainties had been completely…
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Concept art for Thumb
In the Wastelands at the end of time stands a house that contains the secret to humanity’s survival.
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Off to Italy
Just a quick couple of pieces of news: 1) There won’t be a post for a couple of weeks as I’m off on my hols to Lake Como in Italy, staying at a hotel in the beautiful village of Cernobbio. I’ve set myself the task of learning a bit of Italian as well, as Dante…
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Thumb – Concept Art
Update: Consensus of opinion is that the font made it looked too like a comic book so I’m going to rethink the titling. In the meantime, here’s the image. I liked the font as it was a German Expressionist one, but in this day and age it did look a bit too manga-like! I’ve sent…
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The Maiden Tower
I’ve just spent a few days in Latvia at a UNESCO conference on education. The delegates were mainly from Central Asia and Eastern Europe, so I had the chance to talk to people from Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, as well as Lithuania and Hungary. One of the first things that a lot of countries emerging…
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The New Mother
One of the most disturbing children’s stories ever published is “The New Mother” by Lucy Clifford. It appeared in the anthology of tales Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise, published in 1882. In the tale two children, Turkey and Blue Eyes, live with their mother and baby in a cottage. The children are tempted to be…
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The End
Thumb is set at the very end of the Universe when all the stars have vanished and we have entered the phase called the heat death of the universe. Early twentieth century SF writers, overcome with fin-de-siecle angst, often tried out-do each other in constructing visions of the end of the time. H.G. Wells’ time…