Review: Alien Clay
Adrian Tchaikovsky
388 pages
Orbit (2024)
Read this if you like: unique alien ecosystems, Rick Claypool, Vernor Vinge
tl;dr summary: Political prisoners in an Orwellian dystopia are sent to a labor camp on Kiln, a planet where the life is aggressively symbiotic and potentially sentient.
Plenty of science fiction writers have speculated on what life from other planets might look like. But very often, even when the stories take place in the far past, far future, or far, far away, that life looks like something that could come from Earth. Maybe it's a little tweaked—sentient lizards instead of sentient apes, or single-biome worlds inhabited by slant versions of familiar species, but even when it looks very different it functions, at its core, in an Earth-like way. Plants photosynthesize and animals consume organic matter; species evolve singly, over time, to adapt to their environment.
There's no rule saying this is the only way life can develop and exist, though, and in Alien Clay Adrian Tchaikovsky gives readers a different option than the typical. On Kiln, where the novel is set, life isn't quite so easy to categorize into species. Life developed there in a more modular way, with a variety of highly specialized species that join together with various others in symbiotic relationships, in the process building what the humans who come to Kiln see as its plants and animals—though separating the planet's life into those types of categories isn't necessarily accurate, since some of the same parts could theoretically be shared by something that looks like a tree and something that looks like, say, a giant land crab.
To take this up a notch, these symbiotic critters don't necessarily wait for an invitation before offering their services. The humans on the planet are constantly at risk of being colonized through spores and other lifeforms floating in the air. Most of them live in a hermetically sealed bubble, while those who venture out are decontaminated on their return, but it's a prison colony where nobody's too concerned about worker safety, so some people still inevitably get infected. This isn't directly fatal but it does drive people mad, which becomes fatal when the prison staff incinerates them.
For any sci-fi writers who use invented landscapes in their story, the worldbuilding alone in Alien Clay makes it a must-read. It is a masterclass in creating a world that is both unique and holds true to its own internal logic. The way the world is revealed in bits and pieces turns it into a compelling mystery, especially once the reader learns that there is evidence of sentient life on Kiln. This takes the form of large ruins whose walls are covered in writing—or at least, that's how the non-prisoner research teams on Kiln interpret the structures and symbols they find.
Set against this world of Kiln is the future Earth society that the people on the planet came from. The laborers condemned to work in the camp are by and large political prisoners who violated the strict edicts of the Mandate, a somewhat vague authoritarian regime anchored in scientific orthodoxy. Their worldview holds that humans are the ideal form of life, and that all other intelligent life in the universe must match it in form. The discovery of a planet like Kiln, then, becomes a bit tricky for their scientists to justify. In their attempts to make the planet's life fit the rules of Earth biology, they miss or misinterpret a lot of critical details.
This contradiction Tchaikovsky built into his world is another craft lesson to be learned from Alien Clay, because it creates multiple levels of conflict to drive the plot forward. The top-level plot is the story of Professor Arton Daghdev, a recent arrival sentenced to Kiln's labor camp. He, like most of the laborers on Kiln, was sent there because he violated the Mandate's World Order, and they don't give up on their resistance just because they've been sentenced to live out their lives on a planet that seems to be actively trying to kill them. The prisoners' ongoing attempts at revolution is one level of conflict. The Mandate employees they're fighting against don't have things much easier, though. The scientists are desperate to present the reality of Kiln in a way the Mandate will accept, and that won't just end up with them shifted down to the labor camps themselves because of heresy. None of the species they see on Kiln currently seem like a Mandate-approved candidate for who built the ruins they keep finding, and that mystery adds another layer of tension.
There were a lot of things I enjoyed about Alien Clay, but what sucked me into it at first was the voice. It uses another kind of productive contradiction. Arton Daghdev is a learned academic, but the story is told in a very casual tone, one that more embodies the spirit of his other identity as a member of the resistance. The snarkiness and dark humor make it very fun to read. The story takes a unique approach to narrative time, too, told mostly in the present tense but with occasional dips into the future, and with some non-chronological moments that are used very well to control the flow of information and create mini cliffhangers.
In a way, Alien Clay is like the creatures of Kiln. It takes pieces of familiar things and combines them together into something I've never seen before, something greater than just the sum of its parts and difficult to classify using the typical labels. Overall, I strongly recommend it for anyone who enjoys or writes invented world sci-fi or resistance literature, because it does both exceptionally well.
See similar posts: