With a fascinating discussion of the right to life at its heart, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s new novel Dogs of War has recently been published by Head of Zeus, centred around Rex, a bio-engineered Dog who is now a lethal weapon. Tchaikovsky answered a few questions by email from Paul Simpson…

What were the inspirations for this story? A particular piece of research or was it a particular image from the story?

I seem to draw from the animal world a great deal in my writing, whether it’s the Insect-kinden in my fantasy series Shadows of the Apt or the evolved spiders of Children of Time. In this case, I knew I wanted to write something near-future, as opposed to CoT’s far-off space/exoplanet story, but still exploring a non-human viewpoint and the clash between human and inhuman intelligence, and the details unfolded logically from there. Rex came into being because, if we were to take technology in the direction the story posits, I think that dogs would be where we’d go. The dog-human partnership is the oldest one we have, after all. Also, there’s a quote that stuck in my head, from Michael Bywater’s Lost Worlds, about dog lifespans and pet dogs dying, to the effect that we send dogs ahead of us into that undiscovered country, the last service they perform for us. In Dogs of War, dogs like Rex (and other animals) are once again plumbing unknown territory so that we might follow in due course.

What was the biggest challenge in the creation of the story?

Getting Rex’s voice right the first time. It would have been very easy to have Rex as a bit of a parody – too simple, too comical, too human. Walking a line between all of these things and producing a coherent character that would be fun to inhabit, that would strike emotional chords, and at the same time wouldn’t just be ‘a man in a dog suit’. And there’s also the balance between what Rex understands and what the readership understands. Rex isn’t the classic ‘unreliable narrator’ in that he’s profoundly honest in is recounting but, especially early on, his perspective is so limited that his take on events, and his sense of right and wrong, should be something the readers are able to look beyond, to draw their own conclusions about what’s going on with Redmark, his employer.

You balance Rex’s POV with others: did you need to write the majority of the dogs’ sections together to maintain the voice, or did you find it easy to return to it after a period?

I seem to be quite good at just getting back into the driving seat of a particular character after a period of absence. I suspect it’s partly my role-playing background, and partly writing ten books of Shadows of the Apt which had a lot of different PoV characters. For Dogs, therefore, I just wrote the sections in the order they appear (barring a few of the interlocutory parts which I added later to stitch the whole book together – mostly the [redacted]-headed sections). When I came to a new Rex section I generally just skimmed the previous one and that got me enough into character to press on.

I get the definite impression you love spending time with animals and observing their behaviour patterns – are dogs you’ve known incarnated in here?

I’m going to make a bit of an admission here. I’m not naturally a dog person. In fact, when I was a kid, dogs scared the crap out of me (as did wasps), though I’ve gotten over that since. I have a fair number of dog-owning friends now, and I think that helps, both for Dogs of War and for The Tiger and the Wolf where one of the main characters keep dogs (also based on my aunt, Chris Czajkowski who lives out in the wilds of Canada and gets about with a dog sled). What I have done is read up a fair amount on recent dog behavioural studies, which have come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years.  I’m fascinated by the very rapid evolution dogs have undergone in just a few thousand years to adapt to a new environment, being ‘humanity’.

The interplay between the animals – particularly Rex and Honey – is one of the strongest parts of the novel. How much did that alter in the writing, or did you have that dynamic clear in mind when you began?

The dynamic between Rex and his non-canine squad fell into place very naturally. Rex is the everyman (underdog?), our eyes on the bioform world, whose ability to understand that world grows slowly throughout the book. Honey the bear is the clever one, always several steps ahead of both Rex and their human masters. Dragon is cold-blooded, lazy and unsentimental, profoundly resentful of having to be anyone’s plaything. Bees is… bees. Together they make a set of characters who I hope are very distinct from each other, and at the same time work very nicely as a unit – and as a large chunk of the book is their chatter over their comms channel, getting that right was essential to the book working at all.

Were there particular touchstones from past discussions of the topics raised here (particularly the rights and definitions of sentient beings) that especially informed you?

The very concept of encountering a non-human intelligence is fascinating to me, but I have my doubts as to how well we, as a species, would handle it – this goes for external intelligence or that we might engineer ourselves. Children of Time looked at this topic, and Dogs of War follows suit, not only with enhanced animals like Rex but in a broader post-human way as the book goes on and other players are revealed.

What element of the book surprised you most during the writing, in terms of the characters?

I think it’s probably Rex himself. I didn’t have a detailed plan for how he would develop, and there was always a danger that he would end up hitting a single note throughout the book, but instead (and very much on his own) I’m very pleased by the way he grows and changes throughout the book, from childlike (if bloody-handed) naivety to the hard-won self-knowledge of later sections. At the start he is emphatic about being “in charge” of his squad while having almost no autonomy at all. That tightrope, between the hard demands of self determination and the insulated comforts of being someone else’s dog, turned out to have a lot of mileage. I’m not a dog person, as I say, but by the end of the book I think Rex became one of my favourite creations ever.

Dogs of War is out now from Head of Zeus. Thanks to Blake Brooks and Clare Gordon for their help in arranging this interview