A thought-provoking political thriller that we have described as “a wonderfully strange blend of a story that sits somewhere between Total Recall and Johnny Mnemonic with just a touch of Animal Farm thrown in for good measure” we needed to find out more, so we spoke to Adrian Tchaikovsky about the thoughts and inspirations behind the novel…

When did you first get the idea for Bear Head?

This is going to sound like self-mythologising but this is the single book idea that actually successfully came to me in a dream. I was at a convention – I think an Eastercon. I’d had no thoughts whatsoever towards a Dogs Of War sequel before then. Then about 65% of the plot of Bear Head turned up in a dream and I had to frantically scribble it all down at stupid o’clock in the morning before it all went away.

The rest of it slowly came together over the next few months and then I basically shouldered aside every other project and just gave it priority and rattled it out.

Bear Head is a sequel, did you already have this story planned or did you have to see where the story/characters took you after completing the first book?

Dogs Of War was always a standalone. It did decently well though, so that put it on the top shelf as far as possible follow-on material went. However, until the aforementioned visitation, I honestly no actual idea of what that might be, save for some stuff about possible more military marching around, which didn’t seem promising.

Also, unusually for me, I really do think you can read Bear Head without having read Dogs. There are plenty of call-outs for people who did read the first book, but the distance between the events of Bear and those of Dogs means it should all work as a first look at the universe. (Publishers love to say you can read book two of any given series cold, but in my case, I usually get very invested in world continuity so the books often follow very closely and in great detail).

There are some fantastic bear puns in Bear Head. Were there any puns that you just couldn’t squeeze in?

Well, the original title is the Great Lost Pun. It came to me with that chunk of idea in the dream and lasted almost to publication before Head of Zeus came to their senses. It was Bear With Me.

Jimmy is not your typical protagonist, he’s hardly a hero, is it easier or harder to write such a flawed character?

It is infinitely more fun, to be honest. Especially for a first-person narrative. All of my first-person leads are flawed or even openly horrible people. Stefan Advani (Cage Of Souls) is a self-interested coward, Gary Rendell (Walking With Aldebaran) has serious physical and mental issues that slowly creep out over his narrative, and the unnamed narrator of One Day All This Will Be Yours is frankly a horrible, horrible person. So yes, Jimmy is a wretched, miserable and untrustworthy character thrust into a spotlight he really doesn’t want. But because of that, his perspective on the big picture is much more entertaining.

The morality and reality of control and subjugation are themes that both the reader and even the fictional characters have to face. Did you find you challenged your own thoughts on this?

I suppose I’m less challenging them than giving them an outlet and some exercise. One of the central threads of both Dogs and Bear is a sort of extreme iteration of societal control, the idea of ‘collaring’ someone so that they cannot say no. It’s a very comfortable relationship for the person at the top, and historically it’s what a great deal of society has been about – setting up structures, hierarchies and class systems that mean the people below, on whom it all depends, are nothing more than machine pieces in someone else’s mechanism. So the system in the books is intentionally extreme, but it’s honestly just a logical end-game for that kind of mindset.

How did you find the process of world-building for the practicalities of life on Mars?

This is an area I sought help on – a whole set of writers and academics who came to my rescue and threw the problems at me, so I could think through how the tech available to my world might create solutions. In particular, I owe Simon Morden a lot of drinks. He put a huge amount of research and thought into his excellent Mars books One Way and No Way, and was kind enough to share his work with me.

You have a background in zoology and psychology – Bear Head seems like a perfect blend of those. Is it interesting to explore these subjects through your science fiction writing?

Yes, although honestly this is more a direct throughline from my pre-academic interests in zoology and behaviour – neither topic at Uni level really touched on this sort of thing enough for my early Nineties self. Zoology, evolution, behaviour and intelligence make up a lot of my stamping ground for writing ideas.

The book at times feels like a political thriller, do you think science fiction is a good way to explore that genre?

I have read and watched some pure real-world political thrillers, and I do prefer them with genre elements added in (Tim Powers’ Declare is one of my absolute favourites, and my own Doors Of Eden has a lot of that kind of thing too). I think that a lot of the political thriller elements are a really good fit for SF as a general pattern, and then you get to have all sorts of fun thinking through how your magic or tech or alien race’s worldview would change everything.

You’re very prolific as a writer, what’s your process? Do you work on multiple books simultaneously or do you work on one at a time?

Honestly I don’t have any magic answer. I work on one book at a time. I plan extensively and think through ‘the next bit’ a lot between writing sessions, but other than that I just plod on.

What’s next for you?

I have a ridiculous four books out this year – Bear Head and The Expert System’s Champion this month, One Day All This Will Be Yours in March (including narrating the audiobook myself, which I’ve just recorded!) and then the big space opera Shards Of Earth in May-June.

There are a couple of other novellas in the pipeline too – one from Rebellion that makes a kind of dark future triptych with Ironclads and Firewalkers and a standalone alien colony world story for tor.com. Then there are two books to follow on from Shards Of Earth in the ‘Final Architecture’ series, one of which is written and one of which isn’t. And I’m currently tinkering about with a third Children novel, which is still going through various permutations.

Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky is out now from Head Of Zeus.

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The animal world infuses just about everything I write. Spiders, most notably, but also tigers, wolves, dogs and, most recently, bears…

Animals have been running through human narratives since before humans were human. We’ve always known that we shared the world with them. Modern life can’t divorce itself from that heritage, whether it’s Paw Patrol or the oft-repeated adages of how far you ever are from a rat. Drawing from this millennia-old inspirational well, animals sneak out of deep history into modern SF and fantasy narratives in all sorts of different ways.

Beasts in the mirror

Perhaps most obviously, there’s the story where everyone’s an animal. Sometimes they’re animal-shaped animals with a human window on the mind, such as in Watership Down (Adams) or The Animals of Farthing Wood (Dann) – those delightful childrens’ books that are so bludgeoningly traumatic when you actually read them. Other works anthropomorphise their animals. Jacques’ Redwall series is likely the best-known of these, with its medieval micescapades. Polansky’s The Builders marries the human-like animals of Redwall with the emotional punches of Watership Down. It’s a work gloriously unapologetic in its violence, nature not just red in tooth and claw but also axes, knives and six-shooters.

Beasts next door

There are more than a few novels that bring up some kind of animal to a more or less equal state and have humans share the world with it. Pullman’s armoured bears in His Dark Materials are one of the better-known examples. (And I probably should try and drag bears into the conversation, given my own upcoming Bear Head). There are also the enigmatic Gullaime bird-people of Barker’s recent The Bone Ships, who have a hard time of it as slaves of the humans who need their wind-calling powers. And with the boot on the other digitigrade foot, humans are a surly underclass below the foppish, musketeer-y rats in Gentle’s marvellous Rats and Gargoyles.

Beasts at our side

Turning wolves into dogs was one of the first great moves our species made as we increased our agency in the world, and myths are full of pets, guards, informants and advisors in animal form. The animals which are more than animals, despite being visually just another mute beast. There’s the fox in Beagle’s The Innkeeper’s Song which has its own internal monologue and which, we slowly realise, is actually something huge and monstrous and terrifying except it just can’t be bothered with all that nonsense any more and would rather be a fox. Or, to stick with bears, there’s the human protagonist of Hardinge’s A Skinful of Shadows who acts as a vessel for ghosts – including the ghost of a confused and very angry bear that’s not ready to pass on just yet. Alternatively, of course, there’s the goat in Newman’s The Vagrant. Which is just a very ornery, stubborn and bloody-minded goat (much like, to go back to Hardinge, Sararcen the goose in Fly By Night) because sometimes just being a goat (or a goose) is enough.

Beasts as our skin

Turning into animals is another age-old trope, whether it’s Loki pulling a prank, Zeus’s frankly inappropriate love games or an American werewolf in London. In my Echoes of the Fall, everyone’s a shapechanger, and it shapes all aspects of their world. As a younger reader, the quintessential shapechanger for me was Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea. Le Guin sells the experience of being a bird and riding the winds so powerfully that, even now, ‘shapeshifting’ is still my default answer to the old ‘If you could have any superpower…’ question. Another writer who brings the experience to life is Pratchett in his Witches books, though there it’s ‘Borrowing’, riding the animal’s mind rather than actively taking on its shape. Still, the idea of being able to experience the world through different senses and in a different shape is a major driver for my own non-human characters, whether four-footed or eight.

Beasts as our Children

This is a mode of animalism that I dip into a lot: the sentient beasts that we, scientific humanity, might engender. Humans share the universe with the spiders (and various other things) in Children of Time, and humans engineer animal soldiers in Dogs of War, which Bear Head follows on from. And, if you’re doing this in SF, much of this is in the shadow of Brin’s Uplift books, where the deliberate anthropomorphising of animals is a major engine of the plot. Some of my absolute favourite engineered animals are from Gareth Powell, though. Ack-Ack Macaque presents a monkey that does exactly what it says on the tin, whilst finding time for a great deal of introspection about what it is to be a (gun-toting) simian in a human world. More recently, Powell gives us the Trouble Dog from Embers of War, a philosophical spacegoing warship with an AI that contains a lot of canine genetics – one of the most engaging creations of modern SF.

The Revenge of Nature

And if, in the very end, we can’t get on with the natural world, there’s always the chance that nature gets the last laugh. Jeff Vandermeer is a writer whose work is even more infused by the natural world than mine is, and he’s also a deeply committed environmentalist. His writing often presents nature as a cautionary tale: the terrible consequences of failing to respect the rest of the world. Whether it’s the monstrous kaiju-like bear in Borne or the entire ecology of Area X in the Southern Reach series, Vandermeer is a master at bringing unnatural nature into the lives of his readers. Going one step further than this is Peadar Ó Guilin in his novel The Call, where the twisted otherworld his protagonists are kidnapped into is inhabited by an entire hostile ecology that has been reverse-engineered into the animal from the human by its baleful faerie overlords. There is always, both writers seem to say, a bigger fish than mere humanity…

Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky is out on 7 January.

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