Adrian Tchaikovsky

Stand Alone Novels

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Find Adrian as @Aptshadow on Bluesky

They looked into the darkness. The darkness looked back . . .

A commercial expedition to a distant star system discovers a pitch-black moon alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is deadly to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.

Under no circumstances can a human survive Shroud’s inhospitable surface – but a catastrophic accident forces Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne to make an emergency landing in a barely adequate escape vehicle. Alone, and fighting for survival, the two women embark on a gruelling journey across land, sea and air in search of salvation.

But as they travel, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s unnerving alien species. It also begins to understand them. If they escape Shroud, they’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all . . .

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Alien Clay is a book about human societies and alien ecologies. About how the things that are held up as being hard divisions and solid boundaries are all too often permeable. About what people and regimes try to control, and what they can’t.

Condemned to a labour camp on a distant exoplanet, scientist Artin Daghdev is thrown into a brutal prison camp run by a police state that holds the bodies and minds of its citizens in a ruthless grip. Beyond, he discovers a planet that doesn’t play by his rules of biology, ecology or evolution. On Kiln, Arton will learn that no law is inviolable, and no border can be relied upon, not even that between human and alien. Who were the ancient Builders who littered Kiln with their ruins, where did they go, or are they still here…?

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Special Citation: Philip K. Dick Award 2025

Hugo Best Novel Finalist 2025

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A standalone SF novel. As human society collapses, Charles the robot valet travels through the wreckage seeking someone who might still have a use for a well-made cup of tea. He travels through a landscape of robots desperately attempting to fulfil their programming in a world that no longer needs them. What happened to the humans, what part did Charles play and who is the weird, defective robot calling itself the Wonk?

Hugo Best Novel Finalist 2025

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Four years ago, two girls went looking for monsters on Bodmin Moor.

Only one came back.

Mal and Lee were fearless cryptid hunters, until an excursion on Bodmin Moor left Lee traumatised and Mal missing, presumed dead. Now Mal’s back from somewhere else, because the seams between the Earth’s different histories are coming undone, opening the way to all manner of worlds where the history of the planet went very differently.

Tag: Espionage and evolution clash in a secret battle over the world’s many futures.

Winner: Sidewise Awards, 2021

Finalist: Philip K. Dick Award 2021

Shortlist: British Science Fiction Awards, 2021

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Doors of Eden is available in the following languages: German, Hungarian, Italian. Coming soon: Spanish and Turkish.

The sun is bloated, diseased, dying perhaps. Beneath its baneful light, Shadrapar, last of all cities, harbours fewer than 100,000 human souls.

In the end days of the world, Stefan Advani is exiled from Shadrapar, last city of humanity, to the Island prison, deep in the terrifying jungles that are running riot over the world. A pampered academic, he must learn how to survive the guards, his fellow prisoners and the voracious world outside, if he ever wants to make it back. But Stefan knows more about the world and its mechanisms than anyone guesses, and it’s not certain whether he, or his home city, is in greater danger.

Tag: A dying-earth science fiction novel

Shortlist: Arthur C Clarke Award 2020

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Lascanne and Denland are locked in a bitter war after revolutionaries overthrew and murdered Denland’s king. Emily Marshwic, gentlewoman, fights at home with the corrupt governor Northway in a land where most of the men have been called to the front. When she has own chance to serve the king, she doesn’t hesitate. After all, everyone knows the war will soon be won.

Tag: Pride and Extreme Prejudice; Jane Austen meets Bernard Cornwell.

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The first casualty of war is truth . . .

Shortlist: British Fantasy Awards 2016

The path to victory will only be seen through a spider's eyes...

There is a dark lord to be defeated. There is a prophecy specifying how it can be done. There is mention of a spider. So begins the journey of Enth, least of his mother’s seething brood, as he becomes an entirely unwilling member of an adventuring party on its way to probably greatness.

Standalone novel – Heroic Fantasy/Comedy

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