Adrian Tchaikovsky: In all honesty, the zoology degree I did, I didn’t get the content out of it. There was almost nothing on invertebrates at all. There was one lecture about insects, and it was ‘this is how we kill insects’. It wasn’t particularly what I was after. The animal behaviour elements were fairly depressing, because at that time the main paradigm was B. F. Skinner – that animals are robots and you’re not allowed to speculate about their interiority. What drove me to write about spiders, mantis shrimps and so forth was a pre-existing fascination with creatures like that, which the university course didn’t really assist with.