Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky: Review by Russell Letson
Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK 978-1035013746, £16.99, 400pp, hc) March 2024. (Orbit US 978-0316578974 , $19.99, 432pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Lauren Panepinto.
In Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky continues to build fantastical worlds on sturdy non-fantastic-fictional foundations. Where the secondary-world fantasies of The City of Last Chances and House of Open Wounds make use of occupied-city (say, Alan Furst’s The World at Night) or comic-ironic antiwar tropes (say, Catch-22), Alien Clay combines SF with prison-camp and resistance-to-tyranny narratives – both of which are strongly rooted in real-world 20th-century traumas that have fed many a thriller and historical account. And as a kind of reviewer’s bonus, the science-fictional side has uncanny echoes of Greg Egan’s very recent Morphotrophic, with an exotic alien biology that also carries metaphorical-thematic freight.
The novel’s through-line hangs on the first-person experiences (and the bitter, knowing, smart-ass voice) of dissident professor Arton Daghdev, transported to a Labour Colony (a research station/prison camp) on the extrasolar planet nicknamed Kiln. His crime: political activities and opinions contrary to the rules of the Mandate, an inflexible, monolithic, totalitarian ‘‘global superstate’’ in some indeterminate future. He is one of a batch of offenders who have been freeze-dried and hauled away from Earth via disposable sublight starship, to be dumped off over (not on) Kiln. There, if they survive the hazards of thawing out and atmospheric entry, they will be put to doing all the dirty work in support of the Mandate’s efforts to solve the puzzle of who built the abandoned structures that dot the planet’s jungles.
The Kiln station curiously combines the functions of punishment and serious research. The Mandate, especially in the person of the camp’s Commandant, is looking for confirmation of its philosophical vision: to establish that whatever intelligent life is found among the stars accords with the notion that the Mandate ‘‘is just the latest inheritor of a burning torch of meaning, the most perfect expression of the will of the universe. So long as you accept that the universe is specifically calibrated to bring us about.’’ And us means something that fits the Mandate’s notion of civilization, not some wildly strange lifeform that follows its own rule set and has its own idea of perfection. Evidence to the contrary is ignored or repressed, and presenters of such opinions are strongly discouraged from spreading them about.
On Kiln, all those high-level abstract ideas sit atop a relentlessly brutal system of physical repression and fine-tuned social-psychological manipulation, starting with a careful grading of prisoners’ work groups according to degrees of discomfort and deadliness. The deadliest division is Excursions, the gangs that have to leave the camp’s dome and operate out in Kiln’s wildly inventive and invasive biosphere, where they uncover the enigmatic structures, apparently built by a vanished civilization, for later examination by the Archaeology team. Excursion’s biggest risk is infection by an alien biology that can turn a human into a burbling, suppurating mass of miscellaneous failed adaptations. (Detailed descriptions of which are withheld here out of respect for readers’ delicate stomachs.)
The linear plot outlines how Daghdev fits into the prison pecking order; how he survives the hazards of his social and work environments and eventually (as part of Excursions) those of Kiln itself; how an uprising is planned and carried out. But the novel also braids together a set of other strands: the puzzles of Kiln’s biology and history; the nature of Mandate’s power structure, of which the camp is a boiled-down essence; the dynamics of repression and control and of resistance and revolution; and Daghdev’s personal political backstory.
A hint of the prisoners’ value – and of the Mandate’s human resources attitude – shows up early (and recurs throughout) in the notion of ‘‘Acceptable Wastage’’ – a calculated acceptance not unlike a retailer’s bookkeeping category of ‘‘breakage’’ or ‘‘stock shrinkage.’’
They have to work out very carefully the precise level of expense that’s necessary and the precise percentage of failed deliveries – meaning dead people – this entails. Because who wants to spend a single cent more than you have to when you’re shipping people off to die in a distant world’s work camp?
The same principle applies to working conditions and safety precautions: just enough protective gear and decontamination to keep the station working until the next batch of transportees arrives to fill the gaps from Acceptable Wastage. In all these rules and regulations and protocols, the Mandate combines social control (which primarily consists of casual brutality and official punishment) with pragmatic operational needs, all smoothed over (unless you’re on the receiving end) by a seamless web of ideological justifications.
The book seems driven by a vast anger at totalitarian systems, with echoes of everything from the Stalinist Soviet Union to the Third Reich to East Germany to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Its political side – particularly the nature of the Mandate mindset and the extent of its cruelty – develops though Daghdev’s running observations on the camp’s control mechanisms, his periodic meetings with the Commandant, and the gradual revelation of the extent and nature of Daghdev’s political actions on Earth.
And all the while the biosphere of Kiln refuses to yield its secrets to ideology-hobbled Mandate science. The key to the planet’s biota is symbiosis, carried out as a structural evolutionary principle rather than the opportunistic exploitation of parasitism. Instead, Kiln’s organisms are co-ops or collectives, which is not an explanation that is going to satisfy the Commandant’s Mandate-mandated orthodoxy. Some of the creatures would give Neal Asher’s monsters a run for their money. The ‘‘Elephant’s Dad,’’ for example, is a
tripod thing on broad rubber feet, half stepping, half rolling. Its upper reaches are armoured…. And the arms. Three arched, articulated limbs held high to the elbow and then hooked down, fold into its body…. And, damn me, but where the soles of its flat feet should have been it’s got mouths. Gaping, circular orifices lined with grinding radulae, so it can browse on the go.
The novel’s ingenuity lies in the way Tchaikovsky intertwines the prison-camp story line with Daghdev’s commentary on totalitarian regimes and ways of thinking and the literalized metaphors of Kilnish biology – and how he manages the resolutions of these lines and of the modulation from the horrors and brutality of the social and physical environments to something both science fictional and thematically apt. There were times I was just a little impatient with some of Daghdev’s reflections and comments on the machineries of tyranny, and I was never completely convinced of the material-economic side of the Mandate’s interstellar projects. But those were compensated for by, for example, the prison-uprising sequence, or Daghdev’s nearly poetic descriptions of Kiln’s biology, or by the desperate multichapter trek across uncharted Kilnish territory that feeds into the final resolution, which must remain behind the Spoiler Curtain but is simultaneously literal and metaphorical, uncomfortable and satisfying.
Russell Letson, Contributing Editor, is a not-quite-retired freelance writer living in St. Cloud MN. He has been loitering around the SF world since childhood and been writing about it since his long-ago grad school days. In between, he published a good bit of business-technology and music journalism. He is still working on a book about Hawaiian slack key guitar.
This review and more like it in the October 2024 issue of Locus.
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