loppear reviewed Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
hilarious prison planet
4 stars
Wry, uplifting, political, dark academia joy on a death-sentence planet.
English language
Published 2024 by Orbit.
Alien Clay
4 stars
(6 reviews)
Soh Kam Yung reviewed Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
A prison novel, and how the novel life on a planet may set the prisoners free.
4 stars
A fascinating book about life on an alien planet and the conflicts between it and the totalitarian human government (the Mandate) that runs the prison colony on the planet known as Kiln. The narrator of the story is Arton Daghdev, a dissident ecologist captured and sent there to help with research on the alien life. He also learns about the discovery of ruins that hints that a civilisation once flourished on Kiln, and speculations about who they might be.
As for the Mandate, it wants to make sure that all findings on Kiln match its world-view on how the universe works (basically, everything works according to the way the Mandate says it does), so Arton has an interest in finding out how life on Kiln is different and how to use it against the Mandate: for he is still a dissident in a prison camp.
The first third of the …
A fascinating book about life on an alien planet and the conflicts between it and the totalitarian human government (the Mandate) that runs the prison colony on the planet known as Kiln. The narrator of the story is Arton Daghdev, a dissident ecologist captured and sent there to help with research on the alien life. He also learns about the discovery of ruins that hints that a civilisation once flourished on Kiln, and speculations about who they might be.
As for the Mandate, it wants to make sure that all findings on Kiln match its world-view on how the universe works (basically, everything works according to the way the Mandate says it does), so Arton has an interest in finding out how life on Kiln is different and how to use it against the Mandate: for he is still a dissident in a prison camp.
The first third of the story gives an introduction to the camp and bit and pieces of Kiln life, whose biology turns out to be quite weird, but just similar enough to Earth life that it attempts to 'interface' to humans: Arton sees the results of such 'hybrids' and it is not pretty. And that doesn't stop him from joining a prison revolt that goes wrong.
As punishment, he is sent out to help collect Kiln life and find more remnants of the alien civilisation, which gives the reader a closer look at how life on Kiln works. Another disaster befalls Arton, forcing him to trek back to the prison camp. And it is during this trek that things about how Kiln life works, start to join up about and make sense to him. And it may not just help him overthrow the world view of the Mandate, but also possibly free the prisoners of the camp and answer the riddle about how civilisation rose and fell many times on Kiln.
Dr Ms Kat reviewed Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I hated this book the more of it I read
Content warning Spoilers but I don't recommend you read it anyway
This book could have had some good ideas and turned them into something interesting to read. Instead it mashed together a bunch of concepts, not fully fleshed out, and produced some drivel. It's full of tortured metaphors (even in the title Alien "Clay", except there's nothing special about the soil or earth of this planet - it's the ecology and the lifeforms which are talked about). The first third of the book is brutality (it's a convict prison planet), the second third is horror (OMG the weird way that life happens on this planet - genuinely a bit squickful), and then the last third is a hurried, unearned conclusion where humans start to coexist with the life on the planet. It's written in an engaging manner so I can imagine people would be drawn in by it, but the more I read, the more I grew to hate it. I don't know how this got nominated for a Hugo and I'm annoyed that this author has two nominations and I have to read another book by him. Don't read this book.
Tamsin reviewed Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Review of 'Alien Clay' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I think I find a jocular first person narrative really irritating. I wish Adrian Tchaikovsky would write fewer books but make them all as good as children of time (not the sequels).
enne📚 reviewed Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Alien Clay
5 stars
This is now my favorite Adrian Tchaikovsky book. The writing is grippy, the narrator is wry, and I love the way the plotlines of revolution against authoritarianism and academic exploration of alien biology intertwine with each other.
Some extremely minor asides that I appreciated:
The narrator is quite funny and I appreciate the way he sometimes deceives the reader; there are several scenes where you get the surface level view of the scene and then find out shortly afterwards that he's also doing something furtive simultaneously.
I love that the authoritarianism is all about black and white binaries, and the book casually infers that one of the characters fell into political disfavor because they are some flavor of non-binary (without using that word, thank goodness).
This is also somehow the second academic adjacent alien book that I've read recently, with James SA Corey's The Mercy of Gods being the other. …
This is now my favorite Adrian Tchaikovsky book. The writing is grippy, the narrator is wry, and I love the way the plotlines of revolution against authoritarianism and academic exploration of alien biology intertwine with each other.
Some extremely minor asides that I appreciated:
The narrator is quite funny and I appreciate the way he sometimes deceives the reader; there are several scenes where you get the surface level view of the scene and then find out shortly afterwards that he's also doing something furtive simultaneously.
I love that the authoritarianism is all about black and white binaries, and the book casually infers that one of the characters fell into political disfavor because they are some flavor of non-binary (without using that word, thank goodness).
This is also somehow the second academic adjacent alien book that I've read recently, with James SA Corey's The Mercy of Gods being the other. The power dynamic contexts are different enough that they end up taking different collaborator vs revolutionary approaches.
Tak! reviewed Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Alien Clay
5 stars
Another great Tchaikovsky take on the truly alien, this time with added revolutionary fervor. If you like near-to-mid-future scifi rooted in existing social issues and aliens that aren't just humans with weird foreheads, Alien Clay is for you!