The Tyrant Philosophers

The Tyrant Philosophers by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a grimdark fantasy series set in a world conquered by a rationalist empire that burns gods for fuel. A mosaic of resistance, occupation, and forbidden magic across a dying world.

The world of The Tyrant Philosophers is one of the most distinctive settings in contemporary grimdark fantasy - a world mid-conquest, where the conquering empire is not driven by greed or ambition in the traditional sense, but by something far stranger and more chilling: ideology. The Palleseen Sway is a rationalist empire whose ruling class, the Tyrant Philosophers, have determined that the world is flawed and disorderly, and that it is their moral duty to perfect it. They call the chaotic forces of magic, religion, and tradition "Incorrectness," and they are determined to scour every last trace of it from existence - and they are winning.

What makes the Palleseen so unsettling is that they are not simply villains in the traditional fantasy mould. They are bureaucrats. They categorise, measure, and optimise. They believe what they are doing is right. And the engine of their expansion is something extraordinary: their armies capture gods - tangible, localised beings bound to places and peoples - and process their divine essence into fuel for their war machines. This theological extractivism, the burning of the sacred to power the rational, is Adrian Tchaikovsky's central metaphor, and it lands with devastating force.

The series uses a mosaic narrative structure across its books, following a rotating ensemble of viewpoints - revolutionaries, criminal fixers, priests of minor deities, soldiers, healers, and imperial agents - rather than a single hero. This approach allows Tchaikovsky to explore the Palleseen conquest from multiple angles: the occupied city, the front line, the diplomatic edge, the occupied kingdom. It is fiction as panorama, as richly populated and politically complex as the best epic fantasy, while remaining tightly focused on the human - and inhuman - cost of empire.

City of Last Chances won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel and was nominated for the Hugo Award as part of the series' Best Series nomination in 2025, cementing the sequence as one of the most acclaimed fantasy series of recent years.

Books in the Tyrant Philosophers series

City of Last Chances (2022) is the first book in the Tyrant Philosophers series and introduces Ilmar, a city built around the Anchorwood - a supernatural forest where the laws of physics and time do not behave as they should. Ilmar has long had a darkness to it, shaped by its criminal underworld, its exploited factory workers, and its fractious student revolutionaries. Now it also has an occupation. The Palleseen Sway has arrived, and when a mystical Palleseen "anchor" is stolen, the entire city faces a brutal crackdown. The novel is told through a mosaic of perspectives - smugglers, scholars, displaced gods, resistance fighters - capturing the full texture of a city on the brink of uprising. It is a book about what it means to resist when the enemy believes it is doing good, and it announces the series with extraordinary assurance.

House of Open Wounds (2023) is the second book in the Tyrant Philosophers series and pivots away from Ilmar to the front lines of the Palleseen crusade. Behind the advancing armies, a field hospital struggles to cope with the endless wounded. The unit is composed of healers whose magic is forbidden under Palleseen doctrine - tolerated only because imperial science cannot match their results. It is a companion novel that can be read independently, and it functions as a war narrative in the finest tradition, examining the hypocrisy of a rationalist empire that quietly relies on the very forces it officially condemns. Central to the story is a healer who absorbs the pain of others, and through his experiences, the novel asks profound questions about complicity, compassion, and the morally grey choices that survival demands.

Days of Shattered Faith (2024) is the third book in the Tyrant Philosophers series and moves the action to Alkhalend, the jewelled capital of Usmai - one of the Successor States and the next target of the Palleseen advance. Here, the literal erasure of the supernatural by Palleseen forces leads to a metaphysical collapse, a theological horror that escalates the stakes of the series considerably. Survivors from the field hospital return alongside new perspectives, and the novel is praised by readers as one of the finest entries in the sequence - a book about betrayal, personal growth, and the fracture lines that appear when an ancient civilisation faces extinction.

Lives of Bitter Rain (2025) is a novella set in the world of the Tyrant Philosophers, functioning as a prequel to Days of Shattered Faith. It follows Angilly, an agent of the Palleseen Outreach intelligence wing, as she investigates a potential rebellion in a remote province. Navigating the rigid bureaucracy of the Sway while witnessing the slow-motion horror of cultural assimilation, the novella provides a deeply personal perspective on the empire from within - and on the people caught in its machinery.

Pretenders to the Throne of God (2026) is the fourth novel in the Tyrant Philosophers series, following the survivors of previous books as the Palleseen push towards the ultimate target: the supposed source of all magic, the "First Cause" itself. The novel centres on a final siege in which the empire's relentless rationalism comes face to face with its ultimate contradiction. Although originally envisioned as the concluding volume, Tchaikovsky has since announced a fifth and final book that will return the story to Ilmar, nine years after the events of City of Last Chances, to bring the full arc of the series to a close.

Throughout the series, Tchaikovsky sustains a rare tension between the intellectual and the visceral. The Palleseen Sway is a system, and the novels examine how systems consume people - how good intentions curdle into atrocity, how bureaucracy enables cruelty, and how ordinary people find ways to resist, survive, and occasionally hold onto the things that make them human. The political and social commentary is never heavy-handed; it is woven into the world itself, into every interaction and every act of occupation and resistance. This is grimdark fantasy at its most humane - dark because the world is dark, but never nihilistic.