This year I have read a lot of books that feature revolutions. Adrian Tchaikovsky is no slouch when it comes to exploring this topic, but delivers a bigger punch than usual with his latest, Alien Clay. I immediately latched onto its premise, seeing it as a spiritual successor to Cage of Souls, a book that is very near and dear to my heart.
Anton Daghdev has just been sentenced to hell. After venturing too far outside the Mandate’s scientific orthodoxy, he’s been sent to the prison planet of Kiln. There he runs into other political prisoners, some from Science, but others who have committed a spectrum of crimes the authoritarian Mandate deemed anathema to their regime. Kiln is teeming with life, but no one really knows how it works. Daily decontamination is required to avoid letting Kiln’s biology find a foothold in the human body. Daghdev is pulled aside by the planet’s warden and given the task of helping to determine the significance of the life of Kiln and unlock its secrets for personal fame. But it’s not long before Daghdev is pulled back into a revolutionary scheme to wrest control from the Mandate’s guards and leaders on Kiln.
We don’t really need to dive too deep into Tchaikovsky’s popularity within the genre or his popularity on the site beyond acknowledging his incredible presence. I haven’t read all of his works, but I like keeping up with the ones that promise to scratch the kind of itch only Tchaikovsky’s busy hands can scratch. Alien Clay is one of those books, and it also serves as another point in the mesh that is Tchaikovsky’s evolution as an author. We find ourselves following an outsider once again, but one who is more actively an outsider. They are someone who see their crimes against the state as a truth waiting to burst forth from the contaminated ground of The Mandate. I immediately latched onto Daghdev because his inner voice felt so radically different than many of Tchaikovsky’s protagonists. There is a coating of spite, a dash of curiosity, and a heaping helping of injustice that fills the space between every word. Daghdev not only feels personally wronged, he feels wronged on behalf of science, truth, and everything that connects those two. He is not resigned to his fate, and is in some ways galvanized by it, regardless of his own hubris.
If there is one thing that should draw you to the story, it’s the life that exists on Kiln. It is genuinely alien in a way that most science fiction isn’t. It also feels very Tchaikovsky in that he tries to explore ecology and different ways of living. There is a respect for the world that he creates. Something I appreciated from reading a lot of science books is that Tchaikovsky really spends time not trying to impart too many human values onto the life systems of the planet. Sure, he uses our language to describe those systems and how they interact because we don’t have alien words to do that for us. But they are descriptive, not moralizing. I don’t want to dig too deep into the ecology here because I feel like I would be doing it a disservice. It’s one of those things that you’ll just have to trust me on. The man knows how to find new ways to delight and horrify.
The moralizing of this ecology, however, does come through the characters, and that’s where it gets interesting. This is Tchaikovsky mixing his sauces together and creating a wonderful new flavor that I found particularly tasty. He goes through the stages of revolution, pointing out the recognizable levers that one normally pulls and pulling them in order. Events occur, people die, and the planet still lives on. Where it gets interesting is that this is only the first third of the book. Life still goes on, success or failure, and it’s our job to learn why one thing works and another doesn’t. And much like Metal From Heaven, Tchaikovsky’s characters look at the conditions they are in, and which levers they may have missed on the first go around. And a lot of that lies within the life of Kiln itself. And being the environmentally conscious person I am, hea rd loud and clear the messages being sent. This isn’t just about political freedom; it’s about our relationship with the world we live in. We need to learn how to cultivate our ability to listen to each other and the very life we rely on to survive and thrive in order to bring forth a new way of living.
There are some interesting discussions that can be brought up in a work like this. And though I wish I were learned and academic enough to parse through them here, I think this book serves as a good fictional introduction to some of these ideas. I also think that if you’re someone who likes Tchaikovsky for his more deliberate, introspective works on our relationship to the world around us, Alien Clay may seem a bit too streamlined. I think this book is an excellent entry point for people looking to engage with Tchaikovsky but find his other works too big. It’s an excellent key to his work. Come for the alien lifeforms, stay for the ecologically focused revolution.
Rating: Alien Clay Be Born Into It, and Be Molded By It
-Alex
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
