Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

In the opening sentences of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, a spaceship breaks up in orbit over an alien planet, spilling stasis pods whose inhabitants are resuscitated mid-crash, waking to panic and pandemonium as they tumble uncontrollably towards the planet. Some of the resuscitations fail; some of the pods are smashed by debris; some of their chutes fail to deploy. It’s a familiar scene, for all its drama; a classic opening of any number of science fiction stories that drop their protagonists into a crisis and then let them work out their survival and the rest of their story from there. But as our narrator, Professor Arton Daghdev, explains—from his vantage point in one of the descending pods, albeit one that makes it to the planet’s surface more or less intact—this is not an accident, but the system operating as designed. The ship is carrying convicts to a labor camp. It has been built to survive the journey and no more. Dumping the prisoners out in space, terrifying and occasionally fatal as it is, has been deemed the most cost-effective way of getting them to the planet’s surface: “who wants to spend a single cent more than you have to when you’re shipping convicts off to die in a distant world’s work camp? … I hear the figures later: twenty per cent Acceptable Wastage.”

As Daghdev arrives and is processed on the planet known as Kiln (said processing involves several other opportunities for Acceptable Wastage) his narration provides more insight into the running of his society. The system, known as The Mandate, which has produced the labor camp on Kiln, the goals it is intended to achieve, and the pretext for sending Daghdev and so many others there. Kiln is the first planet humanity has discovered whose environment has produced higher-order life. More importantly, it contains evidence of intelligent life—abandoned structures, and markings that appear to be writing. For the Mandate, this is a golden opportunity to validate the central tenet around which it has built not only its scientific underpinnings, but its whole society: “The universe has a direction. And the direction is us.” The purpose of the scientific mission on Kiln is to prove that its lost inhabitants—dubbed the Builders—were humanoids.

An ecologist, Daghdev ran afoul of this scientific orthodoxy back on Earth. With terrifying and effective conciseness, he describes how the loosening of restrictions around scientific study lulled him and his colleagues into a false sense of security and eventually arrogance, and how the fist was inevitably tightened around them. His punishment is to be made into the meanest, most disposable cog in a machine whose purpose is to prove what, as both he most of the other scientists and former scientists on Kiln understand, is almost certainly not true. 

Assigned to Dig Support, Daghdev and his fellow prisoners dissect specimens retrieved for them by teams of Excursionists. Both tasks carry a high likelihood of being infected by Kiln’s ecosystem, whose biochemistry, as Daghdev explains, is alien to Earth’s but close enough that, given enough opportunity, it will eventually bridge the gap. Prisoners who experience this sort of infestation are either driven mad, or subjected to decontamination that leaves too little of their own body behind to be survivable. On top of this danger, there the omnipresent, routine violence from the camp’s guards, suspicion among the prisoners (upon his arrival on Kiln Daghdev is whisked off to a meeting with the base commandant, which marks him out as a potential informant and earns him a beating—which is, he concludes, exactly the intended result), and equipment breakdown. Kiln is a death sentence; the only question is how long it will take to kill you, and what form that death will take.

It can be hard to spy themes in Tchaikovsky’s writing—the man is so prolific, and so wide-ranging in his choice of genres and styles, that any attempt feels like describing a bit of the elephant. Nevertheless, it seems clear that totalitarian, totalizing systems have been on his mind for a while. These systems can be corporatized, as in the novel Shroud (2025) and the short story “Sins of the Children” (2024). Or invasive, as in the novella Ogres (2022) or the novel City of Last Chances (2022). They can even be automated systems left unattended, regressing towards their directives’ illogical conclusions, as in the novel Service Model (2024). Alien Clay‘s system harkens to what is perhaps the most classic literary dystopia, 1984. A system of ubiquitous surveillance, stringent social control, and enforced orthodoxy. As in that novel, the most insidious way in which the Mandate imposes its will on its citizens is by forcing them to be their worst selves. To suspect one another, inform on one another, and claw at each other for a chance at deliberately scarce resources and opportunities.

One of the most impressive accomplishments in Alien Clay is the way it puts you in this suspicious, alienated headspace. Daghdev is, by and large, a good and even heroic person. Someone who, beyond just bucking scientific orthodoxy, put his own safety at risk to strike at the Mandate, and who does so again when he arrives on Kiln, joining a planned revolt of the camp’s prisoners. And yet his narrative voice is almost overbearingly cynical and distrustful. He commits his life to the slim possibility of revolution, but he doesn’t seem to like any of the people he’s rebelling with. He can’t afford to: any one of them could be an informer, and they, in turn, can never be fully open with him for the same reason.

It’s a grey, grimy life, traits that are also reflected in the general shabbiness of all the structures and material objects Daghdev describes to us—the ship built to break up on arrival, the cheap encounter suits that aren’t really as hermetic as they should be, the badly-printed tools and implements that only just barely do their jobs, the vehicles that the Excursionists have to manipulate and find workarounds for, because their designers never considered how they might be used safely by the prisoners operating them. Even the more privileged inhabitants of the camp have to make do with rickety, badly-made crap. Daghdev’s supervisor, an amputee, totters around on an ill-fitting prosthetic, scrambling up and down staircases because no one is going to provide her with proper accommodation. Most dystopian fiction goes the other way—the Star Wars route, in which fascism has a sickeningly appealing, terrifyingly solid aesthetic. Tchaikovsky, however, remembers what Orwell himself recognized: that one of the ways in which a totalitarian system could keep its citizens cowed was to surround them with things that are cheap, easily breakable, and ugly. To give them nothing that is beautiful or worth holding on to.

Against this flimsiness, the strangeness of Kiln stands out all the more. It is a planet that is at once constantly in flux, and paradoxically solid. As Daghdev quickly realizes, its ecology not only defies the Mandate’s scientific orthodoxy, but demolishes it. Every lifeform on Kiln is made up of a myriad separate lifeforms working in concert. A single being will inevitably be made up of separate organisms, their eyes, manipulating appendages, and internal organs all existing in symbiosis with one another. And unlike on Earth, where symbiosis and parasitism tend to be highly specialized, on Kiln they are promiscuous—a component organism might play roles in multiple different conglomerates, and an individual animal might break up and reform, essentially putting the lie to the idea that there are Kilnish species which it is possible to taxonomize (the Mandate is, naturally, pretty big on taxonomy). This poses both a scientific and political challenge to the Kiln outpost’s staff. An amusing scene sees Daghdev’s supervisor present a theoretical model for how the humanoid Builders must have looked, which both she and everyone around her realize is an absurd fantasy, but which must be transmitted to Earth as a product of the outpost’s research. 

When the attempted takeover of the camp by its prisoners fails, Daghdev finds himself relegated to an Excursion team, and coming face to face with Kiln’s insidious biology. A particularly nasty aspect of this work is that Excursion teams are only permitted to decontaminate every three days—as Daghdev explains, this is just long enough to mostly protect the camp and its non-labor inhabitants from contamination, but in the long run it all but guarantees that the Excursionists will be fatally contaminated (and is thus a system of control—no matter how bad the other prisoners have it, they can always be threatened with joining Excursions). When his team’s transport back to base is destroyed, that long term certainty seems like an immediate inevitability. Which, among other things, makes the novel itself something of a chimera: 1984 in the front, Roadside Picnic in the back.

This, however, was also where the novel started to lose me. Because it’s all a bit obvious, isn’t it? The Mandate is obsessed with binaries and strictly defined hierarchies. Kiln is constantly blurring boundaries and refusing firm taxonomy. The Mandate imposes alienation and distrust, making it impossible for its citizens to band together against it. Kiln practices radical symbiosis, breaking down boundaries between individuals on the most fundamental of levels. The Mandate divides and conquers. Kiln comes together and consumes. How the meeting of these opposing forces and worldviews will play out is clear from very early on in the book. There is, when you boil it down, only one idea in Alien Clay, and yet the novel belabors it—even, at some stage, tries to conceal it—long past the point where any reader will have worked it out.

It does not help that Daghdev is very much a tell, not show sort of narrator. Even when he’s describing dramatic events—the prisoner revolt; his experiences as an Excursionist; the upheaval that occurs when the camp’s defenses against Kiln are finally breached—he imposes a distance between us and those events. And that distance is filled up with lectures. With Daghdev explaining—laboriously, repeatedly, at some points ad nauseum—the same things about how the Mandate functions.

Here is Daghdev explaining the foundation of the Mandate’s scientific orthodoxy:

Orthodoxy says we’re here to observe the universe, because the fine tuning of the universe is such that it’s a perfect incubator for a human-style intellect. For humans in general. The laws of nature and the cosmos encourage conditions that give rise to life as we know it, and that life was always going to become us. Hence, we were meant. It’s manifest destiny all the way down. A mandate from the dawn of time. Meaning that our Mandate is just the latest inheritor of a burning torch of meaning, the most perfect expression of the will of the universe. So long as you accept that the universe is specifically calibrated to bring us about.

And here he is again:

Mandate biosciences love taxonomy, always have. That reassuring ladder of species, genus, family, all that; everything in its little box, the whole of creation anatomized in a spreadsheet. All those neat, branching depictions that coincidentally magnify branches of life, according to how close to the human they are, with humanity depicted as a kind of pinnacle, a fairy atop the tree of creation.

And again:

The universe is a pyramid: physics leading to chemistry, leading to biology; microbes leading to worms, leading to vertebrates, leading to apes, leading to us; then the broad mass of humanity leading to Mandate officials, leading to the fine minds of the Cientificos. Because why bother building a pyramid if it’s not you on the very spindly tip of it?

To be sure, there are reasons for Daghdev to be such a blowhard. He is, after all, a lecturer, one deprived of his classroom and thrust into a terrifying situation. It’s hardly surprising that he’d cling to old habits. And the fact that he is alienated from his fellows, incapable of perceiving them except through a murky screen of ideology and political theory, is part of the point he keeps making about the way the Mandate enforces separation between its citizens, even the ones who should be most in solidarity with one another. But combined with the thinness of the novel’s plot, it all ends up feeling a bit enervating.

It does not help that I never believed that Daghdev himself was a product of the society he kept describing. Even before he starts throwing out terms like “yeet” or “leap tall buildings in a single bound”, he feels like a middle aged, middle class, 21st century British man. On top of all the other methods of social engineering that totalitarian regimes practice—and which Alien Clay captures so exceptionally well—one of the most important tools of totalitarianism is how it limits its citizens’ grasp of history and politics, and through those limits, their ideas of what is possible. Even living in a relatively free country, those of you who are over 35 must have noticed how people ten or fifteen years younger often have weirdly distorted ideas about historical events that you lived through—and how sometimes those ideas feel deliberate and pernicious. It seems inevitable that a society like the Mandate would raise its citizens in a conceptual framework designed to justify its own existence, and that even revolutionaries like Daghdev would be shaped by that framework. Instead he feels weirdly normal. His ideas about his world are the same ideas I would have, and that contributes to the sense that he is viewing his story through a screen rather than living it.

Alien Clay ends—this is technically a spoiler but, again, it is all but demanded by both the novel’s premise and the antecedents it calls back to—with the coming together of the labor camp’s prisoners and the planet’s biology, its form of intelligence which is nothing like what the Mandate orthodoxy can imagine. This is thrillingly done—whatever other problems I have with this novel, it is never boring—while still feeling overdetermined. More importantly, for all that he tells us that he’s changed, that the boundaries that have prevented solidarity between him and his fellow revolutionaries have finally broken down, Daghdev himself still seems to be telling us his story in the same way he always did. There is still a barrier between us and the events and characters that exist outside him, and in the novel’s closing paragraphs, he is still lecturing, still pounding into the ground ideas and arguments that have been thoroughly made. The novel’s final sentences don’t feel like Arton Daghdev telling us how he was fundamentally changed by an unimaginable experience; they feel like Adrian Tchaikovsky putting the finishing touches on a thought experiment, a neat idea for how to twist the 1984 premise with the addition of an alien planet into the mix.

As I was writing the first draft of this review, a conversation was developing on SFF BlueSky about the state of the genre. Too many novels these days, the argument went, have top-notch settings and premises, which they then people with thin characters and plots. If you were going to pick a poster child for this phenomenon—which, while obviously a generalization, is something I’ve sensed myself—I don’t think Adrian Tchaikovsky would deserve to be at the top of your list. But nevertheless I found myself thinking about this conversation while trying to articulate why Alien Clay, for all its accomplishments, ultimately fell flat for me. A lot of recent Tchaikovsky works I’ve read have felt like short fiction stretched past its natural size, and saved from utter collapse by the sheer verve and vitality of their worldbuilding and set-pieces—this is why, for example, I ended up generally positive on Service Model, despite its also being a novel with a single idea that is repeated again and again. That alchemy flounders in Alien Clay. It’s a brilliant short story, unfortunately presented to us in the form of a novel.