There are certain expectations at this point when you pick up an Adrian Tchaikosky novel. I feel those expectations have shifted somewhat too, as the writer has slowly emerged as one of the premier SF (and fantasy) writers we have. It used to be all about the insects and spiders; nowadays a Tchaikvosky novel may contain one or more of exotic alien biologies, repressive governments to be fought against, the nature of sentience and intelligence, deep time in the emergence of cultures and societies and civilizations. Isolated protagonists who don’t fit in with their environment or their peers.
2024 Hugo Finalist for Best Novel Alien Clay is a blend of several of these classic Tchaikovsky’s elements. Let’s dig in.
I am going to work this and talk about my engagement with this novel by spoiling a classic strategy game. Back in the 1990s, as Sid Meier was working on his classic Civilization strategy game series, he conceived of another game. For, you see, in those early editions of Civ, one of the victory conditions was the “Science” victory, and that was to get the technological know-how and spend the resources to launch a mission to Alpha Centauri. 1999’s Sid Meier’s Centauri is set as that mission suffers catastrophe: damaged and cut off from Earth en route to Alpha Centauri. The unified mission splits into the game’s factions, arrives and crashlands on a planet circling Alpha Centauri A. You, the player, take control of one of these ideological factions (as opposed to nations from Civilization) spread across Alpha Centauri. Yes, this is just like you spread across Earth in the Civ games, encountering local wildlife, and the other players, but with much higher tech to start. No researching iron weapons here!
But how can one spoil a 4x strategy game? Well, unlike just about any other strategy game of the type, there is a story to be told, a story to unfold during the course of the game. The story becomes clear as you reach the endgame, no matter what the victory type you are headed for is. You learn that the planet is, in fact, a sleeping giant, an intelligence that is dormant but with small amounts of awakening as the game has gone along. One of the victory conditions relates directly to it. Sure you can just conquer your neighbors in classic 4X game fashion (and one of the factions is designed just for that purpose), but you can also complete the Ascent to Transcendence and become part of the burgeoning planetary intelligence, a true planetary apotheosis. You the humans, with your brains, help bootstrap a planetary intelligence into being.
It is my thesis that Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay is a love letter to this game (by intent or by accident), leveraging his strengths and interests to tell a kind of a version of this story. Our first person narrator, Professor Arton Daghdev, has been sent to a prison on the planet named Kiln. Out of all the planets the Mandate (a worldwide Earth government that lives up to its authoritarian name) has found, Kiln has the most temperate conditions and the most native life. Daghdev starts off in a relatively cushy position to help study what appear to be traces of a now gone intelligent civilization on the planet. Where did they go? What do the buildings and the writing *mean*? It’s a puzzle that has been kept secret from Earth, and Anton has been put on the case. Of course those who are already here have their preformed opinions, straightjackets of thinking.
But the thing about tyrannical governments and the people who have power in them is that they never stop being tyrannical. Daghdev falls afoul of the Commandant’s will, and so gets reassigned to Expeditions, which means he has to leave the camp and go into the lush and dangerous alien landscape to find more ruins of the disappeared intelligent life. And on a planet like Kiln, where the alien life is incompatible with human life…but the alien life is extremely good at trying to bridge that gap, this is a slow death sentence…or is it? Daghdev is a classic protagonist in the Tchaikovsky model, often isolated from his fellows and only slowly coming to bridge those gaps as well (this is a metaphor that comes up again and again in this novel). In fact a long journey home after an expedition gone wrong is the opportunity for that bridge to finally form, and ramp us up to the finale of the novel.
Thus, in due course, Daghdev comes face to face with what the builders are, where they went, and what is really going on in the amazingly complicated web of life of Kiln. Tchaikovsky takes Earth ecosystems (which mind you we are still finding out tons about to this day) and recomplicates that model to come up with a Kiln lifeweb and model of biology that makes ours look simple. There is absolute joy and glee as a reader tries to puzzle out what is going on and why. Thanks to the aforementioned Alpha Centauri, my guess came close to the mark. He winds up doing something distinctly different than the straight game’s answer to the mystery, but my memories of the game’s storyline and revelations put me on the right track as to its resolution.
Alien Clay’s modular biology, which takes symbiosis, and parasitism and commensalism to levels not seen outside of sea cucumbers (thank you for that hook in your Hugo acceptance speech, Ursula K. Vernon) can be seen as a metaphor for Tchaikovsky’s framework for this novel. There are elements here that are found in other, and sometimes many other works of his. Oppressive government with a reach to match. A prison camp setting. Alien biologies that the reader can puzzle out as the author throws us clue after clue. Interesting jumps in narrative flow to accentuate and impact the flow of information to the reader. Collective action being as important as single heroes. The nature of consciousness, will and intelligence. It’s never been in this schema before, and it is a most pleasing and useful and effective shape to pour some of the best of Tchaikovsky’s talents to good use.
The other work that I want to tie into here to bring this review to a close is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora. You remember that as the generation ship story that finds that colonizing other planets is a worse than fruitless task, and such efforts are better used to try and work on our own Earth rather than the grand 1950s version of SF of colonizing the stars. Alien Clay feels like a reaction and a response to that: Yes, Tchaikovsky agrees, alien biologies and our own are hideously incompatible…until they are not, which is a whole worse problem. But there is hope at the end of Alien Clay that the Kiln project will eventually be carried back to Earth, and help put right what has gone wrong. The fundamental initial compatibility of Earth Life and Kiln Life can be bridged…and the meeting on that bridge can be good for Kiln…and for Earth as well.
