About
Alex Orlovsky
Alex Orlovsky writes post-apocalyptic fiction about the distance between an event and its history.
Biography Alex Orlovsky was born in a port city and raised between languages, which is the whole explanation for a body of work obsessed with testimony, translation and delay. He came to fiction late and by an unglamorous route: engineering documentation, then archival research, then eleven years of writing at the wrong end of the day.
The Shooter is his debut novel and the first book of The Shooter Cycle.
Writing philosophy He writes slowly, structurally, and against spectacle. A novel should be able to survive being summarised badly. The world should be survived rather than explained; the technology maintained rather than marvelled at. The violence should cost something for three hundred years.
The journey The Cycle began as a single page written to answer a question he could not shake: what happens to a person who is present at the founding of a myth and disagrees with it? Nine years, four abandoned structures and one complete manuscript later, that page is still chapter one.
Inspirations Herbert's ecology of politics. The patient dread of Arrival. The composed melancholy of Blade Runner 2049. The procedural humanity of The Expanse. Beyond genre: Le Carré on institutions, Sebald on memory, and the maintenance logs of anything that has to keep working.
The writing life
At the desk and away from it
Photographs from the making of the books — the places, hours and habits behind the pages.
Interviews
Interviews and appearances
Recorded conversations, festival panels and podcast appearances will be collected here as they are published.