ALIEN CLAY by Adrian Tchaikovsky (BOOK REVIEW)
They travelled into the unknown and left themselves behind . . .
On the distant world of Kiln lie the ruins of an alien civilization. It’s the greatest discovery in humanity’s spacefaring history – yet who were its builders and where did they go?
Professor Arton Daghdev had always wanted to study alien life up close. Then his wishes become a reality in the worst way. His political activism sees him exiled from Earth to Kiln’s extrasolar labour camp. There, he’s condemned to work under an alien sky until he dies.
Kiln boasts a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem like nothing seen on Earth. The monstrous alien life interacts in surprising, sometimes shocking ways with the human body, so Arton will risk death on a daily basis. However, the camp’s oppressive regime might just kill him first. If Arton can somehow escape both fates, the world of Kiln holds a wondrous, terrible secret. It will redefine life and intelligence as he knows it, and might just set him free . . .
The fabulous beauty of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s science fiction is how his visions of alien life and distant worlds can throw a penetrating light into dark corners of our own fragile earth and flawed humanity.
In his latest excursion beyond the solar system, Tchaikovsky gives us a rather brutal introduction to the exoplanet Kiln and the rebel scientist Arton Daghdev (the g is silent). We meet Daghdev as he plummets like a Douglas Adams bowl of petunias towards the hostile surface of the prison planet Kiln. The autopiloted convict ship has ended its 30 year journey with a planned self-destructive dive into Kiln’s upper atmosphere scattering its cargo of desiccated convicts like so many seedpods to be abruptly rehydrated and reanimated mid-plunge towards the ground, and a deferred death sentence in a prison labour camp.
It’s a rough awakening for Daghdev with the chances of survival not that much better than a falling whale.
“I hear the figures later: twenty percent Acceptable Wastage. If that sounds like an absurd loss of investment, then you don’t know the history of people shipping other people against their will from place to place.”
Certainly the situation our first person protagonist finds himself in is reminiscent of many past realities and future imaginings of our world. The first resonance for me is with the boatloads of convicts exported by Imperial Britain to Australia’s Botany Bay , not least because Daghdev’s destination is an absolute riot of botanic invention and danger. The second is with the TV series Blake’s 7 where future set rebel Roj Blake is sentenced to transportation to the prison colony on Cygnus Alpha. Unlike the fellow convicts that Blake frees from Brian Blessed’s tyrannical quasi-religious demagogue, Daghdev has no spaceship Liberator to teleport him off planet. At least Commander Kerrolan, Kiln’s governor and arbiter of life and death for Daghdev, is no deluded zealot but a man of science… er yes, about that!
Tchaikovsky’s writing has always impressed me with his capacity to imagine and explore the alien. Taking the familiar aliens of earth-bound species – spiders and octopuses in Children of Time and Children of Ruin –Tchaikovsky gave us different ways of thinking, of being of communicating. It neatly and comprehensively rejected early sci-fi mantras like the dominance of conveniently bipedal humanoid aliens living on class M planets seen in Star Trek and Star Wars. Tchaikovsky went on in both Children of Ruin and Children of Memory to explore even more alien ways of being – of propagating as individuals and surviving as a community.
On Kiln Tchaikovsky gives us an alien flora and fauna that defy even that fundamental division between plants and animals, so much so that Daghdev resorts to motile and sedentary as a classification that proves both basic and temporary. The fluid nature of life on Kiln spits in the face of such attempts to pin it down – either literally or taxonomically. Writing courses will often suggest seeing and writing ‘setting as character’ but Kiln goes way beyond the complex intricacy of such character cities as Ankh-Morpock, or even the desolate outback of that other prison planet Stark Holborn’s Factus from Ten Low. In Kiln nature is vibrantly red in tooth and claw (well in whatever appendages approximate to teeth or claws).
Which means that the prisoners – indeed the entire camp – are largely confined beneath a sealed dome linked to the outside by airlocks. Those on excursions are subject to decontamination to prevent any aspect of Kiln’s varied biology infiltrating the camp.
I remember a physicist friend of mine telling me, with amazed and horrified awe, about how viruses work by injecting their RNA into a human cell and repurposing that cell to make new viruses until it explodes and scatters viruses to infect other cells. Tchaikovsky extrapolates that earth based microbial aggression to new heights.
“You shoot someone up with a cylinder of even random Earth microbes and it’s not going to go well. With Kiln germs it’s like Earth microbes with a doctorate in invasive fuckery.”
“Exposed to what? To everything that is Kiln. That fantastically opportunistic biosphere that says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and I shall find a way to infiltrate their biology and make it my own.’
Tchaikovsky’s imagining of different ways of life and living draws creatively on his own science background to give us a narrative that is both accessible to the non-scientist and resonant for scientist. Understanding the miracle of life on earth helps him to imagine a differently miraculous life elsewhere. Our own world – indeed as Tchaikovsky points out, our own digestive tracts – are full of relationships between organisms that have co-existed and coadapted (either symbiotically or parasitically) to depend on each other. Stephen Fry once spoke eloquently about a horrific niche evolution of a fly whose life cycle requires burrowing into children’s eyes to lay its eggs and make them blind, an accident of evolution that he asserted surely no loving god could allow. Tchaikovsky’s Kiln is a world of laterally flexible and co-operative evolution, rather different to our own fragile niche driven hierarchy where small perturbations of climate/environment can trigger extinction. That evolution on steroids is what makes Daghdev’s incarceration an inevitable death sentence.
Writing courses will also stress the need to present a compelling protagonist with a distinctive narrative voice and again Tchaikovsky delivers in the sardonic and unlikely heroism of Arton Daghdev, disgraced scientist, would be rebel, vaguely cowardly and selectively unreliable first-person narrator. The text thrums with his sharp observations.
“I can’t quite claim I properly went down fighting, but there had been fighting and I had gone down in its general vicinity.”
“The nocturnal life of Kiln is less well studied than its daytime equivalent, and that’s because no fucker wants to go out into the pitch dark with a butterfly net and trust their luck.”
“He smiles thinly. I never saw so thin a smile. You could open your wrists with it.”
Tchaikovsky’s worldbuilding extends beyond Kiln to a vision of an Earth future ruled by the autocratic and fascistic Mandate – which has found Daghdev and many other scientists guilty of crimes against orthodoxy. As every book must be, Alien Clay is a product of its time and Tchaikovsky’s narrative explores the hijacking of science and its corralling for political ends, in a way which reminded me of Oreskes and Conway’s exploration of business’s corruption of science in Merchants of Doubt.
“The Mandate is simultaneously deeply invested in science and utterly hates it,” I tell him. “Science is what gives them their legitimacy.”
“People’ve dressed up their justifications in a white lab coat since lab coats got white. Except science can also be powerfully inconvenient in that it’s supposed to shift to follow what you’ve learned about the world, while doctrine is supposed to be iron.”
It is this inflexible science that drives the Mandate’s business on Kiln. Commandant Kerrolan heads up both a labour camp and a science camp exploring the archaeology as well as the biology of Kiln. There are strange, inscribed alien structures, too regular surely to be anything but the hand of sentient alien lifeforms now vanished beneath the myriad opportunistic but distinctly non-verbal lifeforms that populate Kiln’s surface. In an echo of another sci-fi film Forbidden Planet (1956) (surely you know who starred in that film), the Mandate and the commandant’s purpose is to decode that language and so learn something of the vanished alien other. To do so the science team need to explore and catalogue new sites of these ruins, sites that drones detect many kilometres beyond the dome’s protection, buried beneath the ‘foliage’ which the unlucky ‘excursions’ teams of convicts have to go out and clear.
Thus, Tchaikovsky weaves the twisted threads of two worlds and many lives around the central strand of stubborn sulky Dahgdev – the commandant’s unlikely favourite. Within the safety of the dome any organic or non-organic object, be it a spoonful of caviar or a flying car, can be printed from the raw molecular matter which is – at least – one point where Kiln and Earth overlap, divided by biology but united by chemistry. Kerrolan’s refusal to sanction the printing of decent protective gear for the convict workers on excursions did put me in mind of the PPE scandal, as Daghdev’s associates venture out clad in material little better than bin bags.
As you see, the narrative, like the biology of Kiln has sucked me in and I find myself assimilating or extracting messages in a way that the Borg would surely approve of. Dagdhev’s eloquent reflections on the Mandate’s political oppression, moral iniquity and scientific sterility have contemporary resonances just as The Handmaid’s Tale now seems shocking prescient about fundamentalist conservative politics.
In one passage Daghdev summed up for me, the difference between conservatism and liberalism.
That kind of game-theory thinking only works if you treat the [people around you as resources and dead weight. If you assume the natural unit of survival is one individual, and not the group.
I saw too a climate change reference (For after all, every book is now a climate change book) in this reflection on his erstwhile colleagues.
I could give him the grand lecture about the Mandate’s scientific orthodoxy, which means everything is politics. About the careers I’ve seen destroyed because my peers had inconvenient truths they wanted to advance.
Against the rigid authoritarian grip of the Mandate, manifested on Kiln by Commandant Kerrolan, the vibrant interconnectivity and co-dependence of Kiln’s multifarious species is both threat and opportunity. When Tchaikovsky has Daghdev rail against his former life “in a world where the vast mass of billions of people were crammed shoulder to shoulder and in each other’s armpits and yet each alone” he makes a compelling appeal for more connectivity. On Kiln “no species is an island” which is a level of interconnectedness we would do well to aspire to.
In Hyperion and Hyperion Falls, Dan Simmons delivers another message that suggests alien might not just be different but could in some ways be better. Drawing on Keats’ poetry about the Titans’ replacement by the superior Olympians, Simmons’ invading ousters offer a moral and technological superiority to humanity, one that humanity must either assimilate with or be exterminated by. In Alien Clay Tchaikovsky poses a similar challenge for a species and a social organisation that thinks itself at the apex of cultural and scientific evolution.
However, Alien Clay is above all else a hugely entertaining read filled with captivating prose and carried by a compelling protagonist facing grave peril on an imaginatively depicted utterly alien world. I have said elsewhere that good stories change characters and great stories change readers, or as Daghdev himself puts it
What would be the point of it, if the man who walked out the far end of these events was the same as the one who walked in?
Alien Clay is out today! You can pick up your copy from Bookshop.org