Really great revolution in a really cool alien world. Join the cause! Viva la revolution! You’re left in the dark to explore the new world with the characters, and then they evolve so much that you still don’t totally get what they mean. But I loved it. Well done and unique sci fi story.

Once again, Tchaikovsky proves just how versatile he is. His range is so impressive. I enjoyed Alien Clay, but it was not a new favorite. The plot is interesting, and the themes are fantastic. I think this would make a great movie. It is a bit slow-paced but in a haunting way. If that makes sense.

However, as much as I liked the main character, the narrative is very stream-of-consciousness, which is not for me. I also don't do well with hard sci-fi. Other than that, I kind of loved this.

If you’re a sci-fi fan, especially if you like your stories weird and a little unsettling, this is one you should check out.

Thank you to Orbit Book for a gift copy in exchange for an honest review.

Alien Clay is a fascinating exploration of extraterrestrial life and creativity that melds science fiction with deep philosophical questions. The narrative follows a group of diverse characters as they engage with a mysterious alien substance that prompts both wonder and existential dread. Tchaikovsky's knack for blending vivid world-building with thought-provoking themes shines throughout this intriguing story.

This is such a great science fiction standalone! Professor Arton Daghdev is being sent to a labor camp on an alien planet as punishment for having the audacity to challenge the Earth's Governmental Mandate. I think Arton is a great perspective to tell this story because he has more of an open mind than many others could in this situation. This story explores how science and politics can be intertwined. How they can be rigid in their thinking and work differently, but ultimately for the same goal. This is also a great exploration into a different sort of evolution. The planet, Kiln, is much different than our own and so it prioritizes things differently. It is that difference that makes this story unique and provides our ultimate solution! This story is fast paced and intriguing, but some of the character work (especially side characters) get a bit lost in the pacing. Still, overall I recommend!

4.25/5 stars! This is a science-fiction entry by author Adrian Tchaikovsky. This book was so well-written and simultaneously creepy af. It definitely was a book where the reader has to think and intellectualize as they go, but I appreciated this because the payoff was phenomenal.

Professor Arton Daghdev has been sentenced to the penal colony on the far flung planet of Kiln. On Earth, Daghdev was not only a xeno-ecologist, but a political dissident who attempted to stand up against the Mandate. Now he serves at the Mandate's pleasure, studying the alien world of Kiln and attempting to help explain who built the ruins on the world -- and trying to decipher the writings they left behind. Daghdev's story is one of navigating political intrigues, studying a lush new ecology, and forging a new unity against the Mandate.

I love Adrian Tchaikovsky, but I don't think that this was one of my favorites of his. I think I'm a more of a fan of his more sweeping space opera books. Often, towards the end of Tchaikovsky's books, when he's really getting into the non-human intelligence stuff, I get a bit lost. (I loved The Final Architecture trilogy, but the final 100 pages or so were just way above my head.) Alien Clay is fairly thin on plot, but rich in examining the various relationships at play on Kiln. The final act of this book was another one where I mostly understood what was happening, but very glad I'm not being tested for comprehension.

One thing I really did enjoy about this book was the more humorous tone. Having recently read Service Model and Spiderlight, I will say that I am gaining an appreciation for how truly funny Tchaikovsky is. If you are like me and like the idea of John Scalzi's books, but hate the mediocre execution, then you should give this book a shot. There's great hard science fiction, and actually funny humor. Neither of which Scalzi is particularly good at. (Shots fired.)

Of the Tchaikovsky books I have read, I would probably place this one at the bottom. HOWEVER, I still place him above most other writers. This is still a great read and very thought-provoking. If you're looking for a sci-fi book with an incredibly layered look at an alien ecology, this is absolutely the perfect pick.

DNF @ 35%

I really wanted to like this one. It had all the makings of a book I would enjoy: political struggle, curious biologist, alien planet, environmental struggle, social strife, among others. Unfortunately, this fell completely flat for me and not for my lack of trying. I’m open to trying Tchaikovsky’s other works in the future, but not this one.

I think my problem lies with the narration. Tchaikovsky is an excellent writer, but the tone and style he chose for this book just does not work for me. I found the main character, Daghdev, to be uninteresting and repetitive. The way he “speaks to” the reader while narrating the events in past-tense makes it feel like the action is passive. He’s not acting within the story, it feels as if the story is happening around him and he is merely observing for us readers. We barely interact with the surrounding characters; I know next to nothing about these people and I can’t seem to care even in the slightest about any of them. I understand these are all likely to be intentional, stylistic choices but they are not engaging me whatsoever. I love both plot-driven stories and character-driven stories, somehow this book felt like neither.

It’s a shame, because the concept of a regime which forces scientists to align their theories with the idea that humans are the natural apex of existence is wonderfully enticing to me. My education in Life Sciences naturally draws me to stories which utilize scientific concepts to add depth to the themes and questions posed in a story. So it’s with a heavy heart that I must set this book aside and move on.

I may not have finished the book, but I’m finished with the book.

——————

Thank you to NetGalley and Orbit Books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book was very interesting. It's chock full of the strange and unique characters and fascinating worldbuilding Tchaikovsky can be relied upon for. It's the most plausible and realistic kind of alien encounter story, not having any bipedal humanoid aliens with the same senses and modes of communication that humans have, or even creatures that resemble something we're familiar with. The character development, interpersonal dynamics, and local politics are what make the story relatable and immersive. As usual, I'm impressed and amazed at how Adrian Tchaikovsky can churn out book after book this original, this interesting, this well written. It's like he's got 10 clones in his head, to wrangle all those thoughts!

4.5, rounding up. The basic premise of Alien Clay is that an authoritarian regime ruling Earth is using convict labour to staff scientific outposts on other planets. The plot is set on a world known as Kiln, where Earth’s The Mandate has set up a dome-protected facility from which to study strange architectural phenomena. It appears to them that Kiln once must have had a population of very human-like intelligent occupants – their orthodoxy about humanity and linear ‘progress’ leave no other possible explanations for the structures they find – and they want to discover where these inhabitants are (or, where they went / what happened to them). Convicts are flown in to perform the riskiest duties – venturing out of the dome, performing general labour, and so on – while a small number of non-convict staff oversee and dictate the goings-on of the facility. Narrator Arton was a scientist on Earth who participated in revolutionary committee work against the Mandate. He arrives on Kiln unsure of the fates of his comrades, unsure of who might’ve sold him out, and committed to opposing the Mandate and its vision of “science.” Of course, Kiln and its structures are absolutely not what they seem.

I really liked this! I have read quite a bit of Tchaikovsky at this point, and haven’t yet read a book of his that I didn’t like; this is perhaps the best standalone of his that I’ve read so far. I must say I wasn’t entirely sure at first how I felt about the narrative voice of the first person POV, Professor Arton Daghdev – something about the tone didn’t quite work for me at the beginning of the book, and I’ve read other reviewers comment on this. Ultimately, I think that feeling like the narrator is addressing me this directly is just not my favourite thing. By maybe 25% in, though, I was hooked, and by the end I think this stylistic choice makes complete sense.

Thank you to Orbit Books & NetGalley for providing me an ARC to review.

Content warnings: body horror, gore, violence, murder, death, blood, confinement, enslavement, mentions of vomit and excrement, torture (mostly not on-page), police brutality, colonization, injury detail

I've always liked Tchaikovsky's novels and this is no exception. I like his characters, plot and ending of the novel. My only critique is that it seemed to take a little long to get to the end of the story. It felt like it was beginning to run out of steam.

Thanks to NetGalley and Orbit Books for the ARC.

I was kinda surprised by how relatively optimistic the outlook of this book is. Sci-fi with similar alien life tends to be very nihilistic, and while it makes complete sense and there is a good dose of dark humor, the overall perspective of the ending is pretty positive. But maybe that's just me, and I'm getting it all wrong, lol. The one thing that got annoying was the fourth wall breaking winks and nudges, hinting at the upcoming events. Not every reveal warrants a "you won't believe what comes next!" from the narrator beforehand.

Alien Clay immerses readers in a richly detailed alien world, filled with mystery, danger, and thought-provoking questions about colonialism, identity, and survival. Has the heart of an explorer, drawing new maps.

Wonderful world-building and scientific creativity. The characters outside the protagonist and primary antagonist could stand to be a bit more fleshed out though, but none of that held the book, and its extremely satisfying conclusion, back

This is the first book by this author that I've read. I can now understand why people love his writing. As someone who tends to lean more towards the fantasy genre, I found this sci-fi book easy to read, understand, and enjoyable.

I enjoyed this book! Alien Clay is full of tension and contains themes of rebellion among others. I’d recommend this to any sci-fi fan or even someone who wants to try sci-fi for the first time.

This was a very interesting take on alien life on alien worlds compared to earth life style. The sheer bizarre differences between the strictly controlled Mandate way of life from which Arton and other dissenters/subversives are sent on a one way trip to Kiln which is teeming with symbiosis of everything makes for a cool thinking story that is hard to put down. Especially after the enlightening march back to the camp that Arton and the others take when their flier is destroyed out on an excursion. Tchaikovsky’s books I have come to realize are quite the psychological journey as well as a science fiction novel. A bit heavy at times but they do get you thinking in ways that might not naturally occur. This was a good read and well done!

I never know how to feel about Tchaikovsky. He has several books I love, and several more I hate, and it's really difficult to judge just which he'll put out next. From so many of the reviews, I would've figured this would be one of the latter, but it turned out that it was more of the former—while it lasted, at least.

Flippantly wordy and characteristically boring in the way of his more political novels. Nothing happens out to the 25% mark. If I can ever get past that, I’ll update this review, but until then… well, I have better things to read.

The lead character… I just couldn’t care. Reminds me too much of the guy from Cage of Souls, who was imprisoned in a terrible, horrible, amazing place and wasted the most of the time complaining about present-day politics done out with fantasy flourishes. I’ve heard good things about this one, so I was really hoping it wasn’t the same—but it proved similar enough.

This is a great book, and pretty typical feeling for this author: it's imaginative with a great cast of characters and I love Adrian Tchaikovsky's stories, and this one is pretty typical from this author: it's a super imaginative sci-fi with a good cast of characters. Tchaikovsky does a great job building a world by following a couple of interesting ideas and seeing where the end result takes him: somehow he always manages to land on what feels like a natural convergence for the couple of ideas.

So: what if some large authoritarian collective starts policing people's thoughts on what life is? And what if the prison colonies that they establish are in space? That's it! That's the book! And it's so good, because the prison colony and the prisoners and the space and the life all manage to be exactly how we feel like they should be while we're reading it.

There were only a few things that caught me off guard reading this. I liked that the style of writing seemed to lean into the unreliable narrator trope a bit. Not that the main character does a lot of lying to the reader or anything, but the narrator character definitely is telling us the story and we get events (past and present) as well as characters ("good" and "bad") filtered through their perception. This gets increasingly cool throughout the book for reasons.

I also really liked the way this book wrapped up. It's clearly a one-off book, and Tchaikovsky does such a great job of writing contained stories, even when they're a part of a longer series (like Children of Time or City of Last Chances). I wouldn't hate reading more in this world, but this is a solid and full story by itself that doesn't need a sequel. If one eventually comes, I trust that it'll be done well.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I just didn't love it as much as I was expecting to. I love that it’s heavy on the science, particularly xenobiology, and the worldbuilding is incredible. But I’m realizing that I don’t find revolution plots to be all that interesting. And I’m not really connecting to the protagonist on a deeper level. The writing style and breaking the fourth wall sometimes felt like a crutch to actual storytelling. For example, using "I didn't know it at the time but I'd learn later that..." as a way of telling the reader things that the main character/narrator couldn't possibly have known. It was done so frequently that it made me wonder why it wasn't just told in the third person instead. Overall, it was just okay for me, not terrible, not amazing. I think a reader who likes the narrative tone more and likes a revolution plot would enjoy this one.

First published in the UK in 2024; published by Orbit on September 17, 2024

Alien Clay imagines a world in which the process of evolution does not move ahead in fits and starts but proceeds in a steady stream that builds to an eventual frenzy. A world in which all life is linked, co-dependent, constantly changing by creating new symbiotic relationships and different kinds of merged entities. Each organism serves other organisms and is served in return.

Competition for survival drives evolution on Earth. On Kiln, survival depends on cooperation, on being useful to other entities. Still survival of the fittest, but the fittest are those that most capably join with other entities to make something better.

Tchaikovsky typically infuses his novels with philosophy. While Alien Clay explores what it means to be an individual human on a planet that invites cooperation with other species, its greater focus is on the evil of enforced orthodoxy, particularly when scientific outcomes are predetermined, not the product of science.

Arton Daghdev was a scientist on Earth, specializing in xenobiology and xeno-ecology. Earth, unfortunately, is governed by the Mandate, a political force that requires scientists to produce orthodox results, rather than the truth — results that show the inevitable superiority of humankind to all other life, for example.

The Mandate combines totalitarianism with something akin to theocracy. Scientists who veer away from the orthodox in favor of objective truth, who grumble about constraints on what they can publish, are labeled dissidents and are sent to work as laborers on colonized worlds. The worlds are harsh and prisoners tend not to live long, assuming they survive the journey and harrowing landing in their sleep capsules. Kiln is the most habitable of the worlds but it is a dangerous place.

Dhagdev’s resistance to the Mandate on Earth consisted of attending subcommittee meetings until someone ratted him out. Because — and this is a point Tchaikovsky makes repeatedly — there’s always someone willing to rat out fellow travelers in exchange for a promise of less pain. Someone ratted out Dhagdev and he woke up in a capsule falling toward Kiln.

Adrian Tchaikovsky likes to start with an interesting idea or two and build from there. The idea that a cooperative society might outperform a competitive one is an unorthodox view in science fiction. Its fans have been fed a steady diet of stories about clever humans who outthink (and thus outcompete) aliens. The idea that human society might not be as strong as an alien collective intelligence is untraditional and might be anathema to some science fiction fans. I mean, the Federation defeated the Borg, didn’t it?

Science fiction also has a long tradition of championing individualism. If there is a Mandate that unites science fiction traditionalists, Tchaikovsky might be violating it with a plot that ultimately embraces the concept of a hive mind (at least one that doesn’t destroy the sense of individual identity) as a design improvement rather than a threat. I suspect that Tchaikovsky is deliberately advancing unorthodox ideas to underscore his criticism of the Mandate’s orthodoxy. Ideas might be debated and rejected or reconsidered but they should never be suppressed.

Having laid those ideas as a foundation, what kind of plot does Tchaikovsky build? Not clever humans against an alien menace but open-minded humans rising up against their oppressor. Although Dhagdev is initially assigned to tasks the resemble the performance of science, his instinct to join an insurrection is punished with reassignment to a team of prisoners who are sent into the jungle. Excursion teams make first contact with complex structures that appear to have been erected by builders who can no longer be found on Kiln. The excursion teams clear the structures of plants that have overgrown the outer walls so that scientists can study them safely — in particular, lines of inscriptions that might or might not be a form of writing.

The Mandate does little to protect excursion team members from contamination by aggressive spores, spiky plants, and large beasts that stomp on humans. One of the original scientists has done nothing but babble since being infected by something outside the walls of the labor camp, but she refuses to die — and the person in charge of the camp prefers to study her rather than kill her.

So we have a plot that follows a rebellious scientist as he interacts with an ecosystem that he begins to understand on an internal level. Can he lead a rebellion? Not exactly, but Tchaikovsky puts a neat spin on the notion of leadership in a cooperative society. In any event, the plot gives Dhagdev a series of adventures and challenges that keep the story moving. It’s fun and at least modestly thought-provoking, a good combination for a science fiction novel.

RECOMMENDED

I included this book in my list of the top ten books I read in 2024. Here is what I said on Bluesky and will say on other social media platforms: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky is wonderful SF that feels very timely. Every thing I've read by him has been rock solid and this one takes it even further.
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