[the painting is] a kind of hell, except it was called 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'. The joke, I take it, being that it's a delight humanity is excluded from. Everything else in the picture's having a grand time living it up at our expense. Being on Kiln feels like that to me. I can almost hear the pop and fizz of the planet's biospehere having its riotous party... [loc. 3147]
Xenoecologist Professor Arton Daghdev has been exiled from the repressive and totalitarian Mandate for political dissidence. Alien Clay opens with his horrific descent through the atmosphere -- in a flimsy capsule, from a disintegrating single-use spaceship where he's been freeze-dried for the journey, watching as others die ('Acceptable Wastage') when their capsules fall apart -- to Kiln, one of only three planets yet discovered where multi-cellular life has evolved. Daghdev is desperate to investigate the mysterious ruins left by a lost civilisation, but instead he's set to labour in the riotous and deadly jungle that surrounds the penal colony. When he's not hacking his way through the Boschian biota to reveal more ruins for others to investigate, he's assisting in the dissection of dead (or mostly-dead) alien creatures. (Not that the colony's findings can be reported to the Mandate, since what they're discovering doesn't fit the restrictions of Mandate scientific thought.) Daghdev, with his brilliant mind and his regrettable habit of heterodox thinking, may be the best person to unravel the mystery of Kiln, if it doesn't kill him first.
Tchaikovsky has written some of my favourite science fiction novels of the last decade -- for example, Doors of Eden and Dogs of War: I find him a very variable author, though, and didn't like Alien Clay as much as I'd hoped. It's a good read, inventive and well-written and with an intriguingly bleak narrator, but it meandered and became somewhat repetitive towards the end -- which makes perfect sense in terms of the plot, but could still have been tightened up without loss of impact. I might have liked this more if Daghdev had been more likeable, or if it hadn't been solely his narration. Perhaps if one of the two major female characters (both scientists) or fellow non-binary dissident Ilmus, had taken over some of the narration...? A fascinating scenario, though, and the science is compelling.
Fulfils the ‘Has futuristic technology’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.
Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy. UK Publication Date is 28th March 2024.
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