Adrian Tchaikovsky takes on familiar themes in Alien Clay, but, as always, he shuffles the cards of his imagined realities to create a story that is also uniquely powerful. Arton Daghdev, an academic revolutionary who transgressed the rules of orthodoxy imposed by the dictatorial Mandate on Earth (similar to the Perfection ideology in Days of Shattered Faith), has been sentenced to a prison camp on a distant planet, Imno 27g, also known as Kiln, a strange jungle-like place reminiscent of Area X in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.
It’s a hostile environment for humans where everything is growing and anything can eat you, or at least invade and change you. There are ruins suggesting a civilization and what appears to be writing, though it has resisted all attempts to decipher its strange curves and squiggles. The Mandate’s scientists, who run the camp, are determined to understand these new life forms but can only interpret them within the strict boundaries of scientific orthodoxy. And that doesn’t seem capable of interpreting what expeditions of prisoners into the wilds have found. Of course, it’s always the expendable prisoners who go out on “excursions” to hack through wild growth and try to avoid strange, sometimes gigantic beasts that can kill in many ways.
Daghdev writes in the present tense and begins by hurling us into the disaster of his awakening from cryo-sleep just as the spaceship taking him to Kiln is splitting apart and dropping its cargo of prisoners encased in pods in free fall down to the surface of the planet. This is by design of the Mandate, which doesn’t want to waste resources on a ship capable of return. He knows there is a certain amount of “Acceptable Wastage” and wonders if that will include him. There are people whose pods fail to wake them or whose parachutes fail to cushion the free-fall descent or whose tiny pod jets fail to push them close enough to the prison camp so that they will be lost on the planet and not worth the trouble of sending out rescue parties.
Though it seems we’re in that terrifying moment with him, his present tense is a kind of historical one. He lets us know before long that he can hide things from us that only come out when he wants them to, and he even switches around the sequence of events to bring out his themes. We get glimpses of Daghdev’s sense of guilt about his survival, as he gradually reveals details of his own experience as a revolutionary academic. (“That was me, the soft-handed academic trying to stick it to the Mandate.” or “I can be anyone’s hypocrite if it gets me fed.”) His wry tone leaves us in the dark about whether or not he might have betrayed some of his comrades whom he meets again on Kiln and who wonder if he can be trusted now,
Questions about Daghdev’s loyalty to the cause of revolution are heightened when he is brought before the governor of the prison camp, Terolan. Arton has to overcome many doubts among the prisoners before he is finally allowed to join their secret discussions. From early on, rebellion is brewing but seems hopeless in face of the Mandate’s heavily armed security forces and the apparent hostility of the surrounding environment.
Terolan fancies himself a man of science and has kept up with the journals of biology where he has encountered important papers by Daghdev. So he enlists Arton to join the crew of scientists working to understand Kiln biology, an offer Daghdev has little choice but to accept. He is soon put to work under the watchful eye of a biologist named Primatt who, along with her fellow biologists and an archeological team, have been stymied at interpreting the evidence before them within the boundaries of Mandate ideology.
Daghdev learns that the biome of Kiln doesn’t follow the survival of the fittest approach of Earth’s evolution and the Mandate’s ideological insistence that evolution marches in one irreversible direction toward the supremacy of human life. It is instead commensal or communal or, as Tchaikovsky put it in a recent interview, modular. Each organism is capable of latching onto any number of other creatures and adding new organs or limbs that can function quite well on their own. So there are composite entities of bizarre shapes that can’t exactly be killed since each part can split off and function on its own, at least until it finds another host.
They achieve their symbiosis on a molecular level – and while they haven’t encountered anything like humans before it’s just a matter of time before Kiln’s molecules unlock the secret of combining with human tissue. What the humans find when this happens is not death or madness, which they expect, but a connection with every other living thing and a kind of common knowledge that preserves individuality while enabling all to function as a group in silent communication.
It is not so much scientific experiment as the ability to think beyond the enforced categories of Mandate thought and interpret personal experience that enable Daghdev and his mates to understand what life on Kiln is all about. And while that exuberant and aggressive life threatens to take over everything, the rebels of Kiln will have staggering choices to make about what comes next. Alien Clay doesn’t try to answer these questions but carries us through the exciting exploration and rebellion against orthodoxy that make a new approach to life possible.
Tchaikovsky takes us as close as he can to the lies and propaganda we face today. For the Mandate, letting in the alien, the other is anathema. Daghdev compares the attitude about Kiln life getting into the secure bubble of the prison camp to the posters he recalls seeing on Earth regarding “undesirables.” That slogan was, Let one in, Let them all in!
Alien Clay is at its most original in conceptualizing a very different life form. While the themes of dictatorship, enslavement, oppression and colonization are familiar, Tchaikovsky makes everything fresh and compelling through his interesting narrator and the sheer abundance of his imagination. I don’t know how he does it, but Tchaikovsky keeps turning our books at a great rate while making every one of them deeply interesting and engaging.
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