The Private Life of Elder Things
From the wastes of the sea to the shadows of our own cities, we are not alone. But what happens where the human world touches the domain of races ancient and alien?
Museum curators, surveyors, police officers, archaeologists, mathematicians; from derelict buildings to country houses to the London Underground, another world is just a breath away, around the corner, watching and waiting for you to step into its power.
The Private Life of Elder Things is a collection of new Lovecraftian fiction about confronting, discovering and living alongside the creatures of the Mythos.
- A terrible secret beneath Paddington Station that is about to turn the Circle line into a Shoggoth trap
- An old archaeologist haunted all her life by a death she caused, and the shadowy creature she invoked to do it.
- A string of terrible deaths associated with lurid graffiti of a hound
- A lost mariner in a strange Sargasso where the ships are picked clean of humans by strange slave-takers.
- A new “legal high” from a machine that opens the mind to another world, and makes users visible to those creatures
- A visitor to a country house charged with finding its lost rooms
- A gifted mathematician’s apparently flawed theories attract the attention of beings to whom her numbers make perfect sense.
Contents:
- Donald by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Pitter Patter by Adam Gauntlett
- Special Needs Child by Keris McDonald
- Irrational Numbers by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- New Build by Adam Gauntlett
- The Branch Line Repairman by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Devo Nodenti by Keris McDonald
- Season of Sacrifice and Resurrection by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Prospero and Caliban by Adam Gauntlett
- Moving Targets by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- The Play's the Thing by Keris McDonald
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Adrian Tchaikovsky
In the realm of speculative fiction, where the boundaries between science and imagination blur, Adrian Tchaikovsky writes with the precision of a biologist and the curiosity of a philosopher. Known for weaving evolutionary theory into alien worlds and giving sentience to the most unexpected of creatures, he crafts stories that challenge not just what it means to be human—but what it means to be alive.
Tchaikovsky’s breakout novel, Children of Time, didn’t just introduce readers to a distant planet populated by hyper-intelligent spiders—it redefined what readers expect from space opera. Bold, cerebral, and emotionally resonant, the book went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award, with its sequel Children of Ruin deepening the saga’s exploration of consciousness, cooperation, and survival. In 2023, the Children of Time series earned the Hugo Award for Best Series, a fitting recognition for stories that dare to look evolution in the eye and ask: what if?
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