ALIEN CLAY

A View To A Kiln

RELEASED 28 MARCH

400 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Adrian Tchaikovsky

Publisher Tor Books

A major theme of Alien Clay is extraterrestrial evolution reshaping the familiar building blocks of life into something strange and new. The same could be said of this brilliant, gripping standalone novel, which reconstitutes numerous familiar SF tropes to create something thought-provoking, unexpected and at times unsettlingly weird.

In a distant future, academic turned dissident Arton Daghdev is sentenced to a one-way trip to Imno 27g (known colloquially as Kiln) by a totalitarian Earth government doing its best to stamp out free speech and “heterodox” thinking.

This so-called Mandate has grand designs on bending science to fit its narrow-minded ideology, even though the flora and fauna of this strange new world defy both classification and any attempt to tame them. The Mandate would also like to know who (or what) built the strange structures littered over the planet’s surface. Ancient civilisations, corrupt future regimes and convicts forcibly relocated to hostile worlds are hardly radical ideas in SF. Nonetheless, Adrian Tchaikovsky – an author whose CV boasts fantasy, science fiction and an Arthur C Clarke Award-winning novel about sentient spiders – ensures you never feel like you’re covering old ground.

The opening chapter alone is a masterclass in genre storytelling, a breakneck introduction in which Daghdev is rehydrated (think human Pot Noodle), arrives on Kiln by the skin of his teeth, and realises that several of his fellow prisoners have become “Acceptable Wastage” in transit.

The subsequent story is told from Daghdev’s point of view, and he’s a compelling focal point – not an unreliable narrator, perhaps, but not an entirely impartial one, either. He’s idealistic, certainly, but constantly questions his motivations and moral courage as others on the base plot to overthrow the zealots of Kiln’s ruling classes. He also talks like an actual human being, possesses a laugh-out-loud sense of humour, and – perhaps most importantly – brings a scientist’s rigour to his descriptions of Kiln’s bizarre ecosystem, even as extended time on the planet’s surface begins to alter his perspective on life, the universe and, well, everything.

Not that it’s particularly easy to visualise his alien encounters, seeing as natural selection on Kiln has come up with very different evolutionary solutions. Indeed, this (un)natural world is light years from the cosy, symmetrical norms of Star Trek and Star Wars, a biosphere inhabited by creatures with legs, mouths and other assorted appendages in all the wrong places.

Self-confessed insect and arachnid enthusiast Tchaikovsky injects his narrative with intriguing real-life analogies – did you know starfish can turn their stomachs inside out to envelop their prey? – to keep things more-or-less relatable. But mostly he revels in Kiln’s other-ness, leaving you feeling slightly discombobulated, yet eager to know more.

There are definite parallels with Avatar’s Pandora in the creation of a world where organisms exist in a carefully calibrated web of symbiosis. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine anyone falling in love with Kiln’s indigenous species, whose aggressive genetic code has an unfortunate tendency to attack outsiders on a cellular level – there’s an undeniable body horror element to much of what unfolds here.

But Alien Clay also wonders whether the locals are genuinely the scariest thing about a world that’s (nominally) ruled by an ideological commandant whose interest in intellectual pursuits can’t mask his penchant for brutality. Subtexts and allegories are everywhere as Daghdev and other wannabe revolutionaries try to work out who can be trusted, and find themselves transformed by life on another planet.

It’s a book that asks plenty of questions, and while it doesn’t necessarily deliver the answers you were expecting, it’s certainly food for the brain – or whatever freaky combination of cells does the job on Kiln. Richard Edwards

Next from the prolific Tchaikovsky: robot servant tale Service Model in June, and enviro-horror Saturation Point in August.