Alien Clay

I was hooked from the start with Tchaikovsky's description of sending prisoners to Kiln as freeze-dried corpsicles that are reanimated on arrival. Actually doable? Actually money-saving? Hell if I know. Grabbed my attention.

Kiln has life. Not only does it have life, it has monuments built be an intelligent species, but there's no sign of them. That's a secret that was kept from Earth by it's rulers, the Mandate. Arton Daghdev, our protagonist is an unorthodox xenobiologist. A prisoners because of the unorthodoxy. But also he didn't know because it was kept so tightly secret. And the last part of of the premise is that there aren't exactly species on Kiln. The flora and fauna, such as they are, are more agglomerations of species with one purpose each: a stomach and an eye and a leg muscle get together to form a symbiotic creature. But they can all split up and form other creatures somehow.

So Arton is doing two things: trying to figure out what happened to the builders, and fighting the Mandate as its prisoner. He's got gallows humor in spades. He's also a somewhat unreliable narrator, though it's mostly lies by omission. The story drags in parts. When Arton merits extra punishment, he goes into overlong detail on that punishment. And lastly, the suspicious nature of a subjugated population is hammered home again and again. Yes, I get it that people, especially prisoners, are going to wonder who the snitches are. But by the 5th or 6th time Tchaikovsky and Daghdev go into it I was just wanted to move on.

But Tchaikovsky also ties it all together pretty nicely. The nature of life on Kiln is especially vexing for a totalitarian orthodoxy, and provides some distinct advantages when the conflict between them comes.

Half a star off because it does kind of drag in places.

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.