(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
There is something thrillingly intense about every book that Adrian Tchaikovsky writes.
While his stories aren’t necessarily told in an adrenalised pedal-to-the-metal fashion, they are always packed full of intriguing and utterly fascinating ideas that percolate with ferocity and passion out of every word and page, and which yet somehow seem to fit into the overall nuanced and thoughtfully expressed style and feel of his work.
Alien Clay is a perfect example of this sci-fi writer right at the peak of his craft.
A standalone novel, Alien Clay is the story of the supposed end of one man’s life and the surprising way in which his condemned existence becomes someone else entirely in the face of an authoritarian system that does not brook the sorts of deviations from the norm that he experiences.
But as Alien Clay kicks off, Professor Arton Daghdev is waking violently and without warning from a thirty-year trip to the far-off penal colony planet of Kiln, his body sucked dry of all life and nutrients for the duration of the journey and his captors not much caring if he and his fellow prisoners live or die.
There’s so little consideration of the value of anyone’s life in a future Earth ruled by the tightly-controlled precepts of the Mandate that they actually factor in that a certain number of people will die in transit and on arrival and plan accordingly, down to the fact that prefab ships they arrive burst upon upon entry to the planet’s atmosphere.
‘What does he want?’ I ask. Then certain things fall into place and I say, ‘He’s not a Philanthropist, is he?’ They nod. My heart sinks. Just when I thought things had stopped getting worse, fate has one last turd to drop in my begging bowl. That one particular gem of Mandate scientific doctrine that we ripped the piss out of, back when we weren’t prisoners or fugitives. It is, I suppose, as fitting a capstone – gravestone – to my academic career as any.
He and many of his fellow incarcerated dissenters have dared to question an oppressively unimaginative system that has decided how pretty much everything will happen or be expressed and which will not tolerate even a micron’s deviation from this rigidly-enforced norms.
In this authoritarian hellhole, even academics must start their research from the approved and communicated destination point – knowledge does not exist for its own sake or for intellectual enrichment but simply as a means of crudely bolstering already-determined orthodoxy – and work not to actually find out how something really is but how it supports the idea that the universe points to humanity in general, and the Mandate in particular.
In a world this tightly bound, Daghdev and a host of others dared to see the world as it is and not as they are told it should be (or is if you believe blindly in what the Mandate promotes) and paid the ultimate price for it, sent to Kiln on a one-way ticket to work their sentence off in brutally unforgiving labour until the day they die.
Which in a world teeming with monstrously-expressed life which bears no real resemblance to that on Earth save for its headlong, frantic desire to enthusiastically and endlessly remake and reconstitute itself in a fast-paced evolutionary race for a finish line that keeps moving ever forward as the ceaseless biology of Kiln demands it do so.
It’s life on fast-forward and to the guards, prisoners and the camp’s commandant, it’s way too fast, vicious and nasty to be anything other than a grave and ever-present threat.
(courtesy official author site)
But then something happens to Daghdev and everyone else that makes them realise that they have quite possibly be looking at everything completely wrongly and that maybe Kiln holds some deep, dark secrets that may upend even the immovable orthodoxy of the Mandate.
Of course, what that is is too far into spoiler territory to be shared here, but suffice to say in the exploration of what this secret could be, Daghdev and the others come to understand that maybe you don’t attack and prevail over authoritarianism by dealing with it on its own terms but by subverting them completely.
In many ways, Alien Clay is a thoughtful, funny (Daghdev has a way with self-deprecatory wit) and at times unnerving rumination on how dictatorial systems survive in large part because they isolate everyone from each other in an atmosphere of leaching paranoia and mistrust that means no one can really get close to anyone else lest they be betrayed and yes, end up on somewhere like Kiln.
The key them Daghdev wonders, is whether you have to then try to bring people into close community is defiance of that state-sanctioned isolationism but as he comes to understand, that’s easier said that done in a society where no one trusts anyone else, and whether the idea of intimacy and closeness os not welcome or lovely but a dark and terrible existential threat.
In the end they have to let us out, because as a permanent exhibit we’d cause more disruption. Kiln did not drive us mad. It just drove us together.
Somehow in the midst of surviving the violence, corrosive mind-games and political machinations of Kiln’s blighted inhabitants, Daghdev, who’s constantly seeking companionship in a societal structure not geared to it in any sort of meaningful way beyond some sort of crudely exercised mutual survivability – which by the way, doesn’t survive long in the face of pressure from the powers-that-be – stumbles across, along with his Excursions team whose job it is to uncover and excavate the ancient ruins which litter the landscape (proof of a long-vanished alien intelligence), the aforementioned secret which challenges everything they have ever known.
How it affects them is liberating and chilling all at once, carrying the seeds of freedom from the Mandate but the very real possibility of authoritarianism and group-speak under a more benign but possibly no less dangerous guise.
In a novel packed with pulsating ideas on science, society and politics, which fill Alien Clay to the narrative brim without sinking the very plot they are meant to enhance, it is what happens to Daghdev and his fellow prisoners and even the guards etc that blows wide open any idea of what you think is going to happen in the story.
Brilliantly clever and insightful and equipped with a masterful writing style that marries expansive ideas with carefully-calibrated narrative momentum, Tchaikovsky gives us a fantastically rich and nuanced take on what authoritarianism is, how it might be tackled if we drop all our old ideas of how to do that and how community, good old selfless, sacrificial, for the betterment of all community might be the way forward but not even remotely like you think it might be, which in itself in a propulsively revolutionary idea.