#Review - Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Alien Clay

Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tor,  28 March 2024
Available as: HB, 400pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035013746

I'm grateful to Black Crow PR for sending me a copy of Alien Clay  to consider for review.

Before Nineteen Eight-Four was published, George Orwell played with many of its themes in his other writings, especially his regular newspaper columns. In one of these he wrote something to the effect that even the strictest of totalitarian regimes would have, for a time, to respect natural laws: when designing a rocket, one had to proceed on the basis that two plus two equals four, even if the Party decided that the answer was five. 

But only for a time. Complete power would dissolve this need, and in his new book Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky gives us a world - worlds - past that point, where the natural, as well as the social, sciences are expected to toe the line of The Mandate, the cabal that runs Earth now. The problems that leads to when they encounter alien life - truly alien life, not Star Trek style bipeds with funny faces - is a focus of this book. The narrator, a respected academic who's been purged for unorthodoxy, is condemned to a penal colony on an alien world, Kiln, where the effort is on to portray the missing race that constructed strange, ceramic towers now overrun by jungle, as a human analogue.

For humans, it's basically a death world, the alien flora and fauna aggressive, adaptive and dare I say it, subversive. Protective gear and decontamination are essential, yet only provided half-heartedly - after all, the workforce is expendable, and destined never to go home. Even the ships that bring them are minimal, as cheap as will serve, breaking up on arrival. Life is then brutal.

It's a tough gig, and Arton Daghdev, thirty light years from home, is hampered in his task by doubts - doubts about who betrayed him, doubts about who he may have betrayed, doubts about who he can trust now. That's how they get you, he tells himself several times. That's how we get you. In another parallel with Nineteen Eighty-Four, it's understood that, cornered by the Mandate, everyone will crack. And this is equally true of the invasive, ineluctable wildlife of Kiln, a tour de force of invention that Tchaikovsky manages to make both truly alien, almost incomprehensible, and therefore deeply threatening - but also, precisely because it so different, also utterly beyond the silly political games being played out by the invaders from Earth. It's a long time since I read SF with such a strange native flora and fauna. As I said above, it's not people in elaborate costumes, it's not life as we know it, Jim, it's - well, simply weird, challenging the human sense that we "are the first of things". I won't try and describe it both because that would rather spoil the story and because I'm not sure I can. You'll have to read the book to find out what's going on here.

What I will say is that Tchaikovsky is not only playing with exobiology here, he's also riffing off parallels between revolution - its failure modes explored at length - and that alien life, he's studying the powerful and their failures of imagination, their inability to understand that the world will not be what they wish, because they wish - in a salvo that could be aimed at climate denialism and species destruction we see here the ultimate consequence of that failure and it's not a safe or pretty story.

At the same time, Daghdev himself (the g is silent) is a fascinating study, a figure who gives away very little of his past - his story leaking out rather than being set down - and whose relationships and likely behaviour in his new setting are mysterious. The novel is as much a discovery of him as it is of Kiln - and what a novel it is, one I'd strongly recommend, deeply compelling form the first page to the last.

Alien Clay draws an eerie parallel between Arton's radical past, with its "revolutionary sub-committees" and the roiling, baffling array of alien life to be found on Kiln.

For more information about Alien Clay, see the publisher's website here.