Alien Clay

A fascinating book about life on an alien planet and the conflicts between it and the totalitarian human government (the Mandate) that runs the prison colony on the planet known as Kiln. The narrator of the story is Arton Daghdev, a dissident ecologist captured and sent there to help with research on the alien life. He also learns about the discovery of ruins that hints that a civilisation once flourished on Kiln, and speculations about who they might be.

As for the Mandate, it wants to make sure that all findings on Kiln match its world-view on how the universe works (basically, everything works according to the way the Mandate says it does), so Arton has an interest in finding out how life on Kiln is different and how to use it against the Mandate: for he is still a dissident in a prison camp.

The first third of the story gives an introduction to the camp and bit and pieces of Kiln life, whose biology turns out to be quite weird, but just similar enough to Earth life that it attempts to 'interface' to humans: Arton sees the results of such 'hybrids' and it is not pretty. And that doesn't stop him from joining a prison revolt that goes wrong.

As punishment, he is sent out to help collect Kiln life and find more remnants of the alien civilisation, which gives the reader a closer look at how life on Kiln works. Another disaster befalls Arton, forcing him to trek back to the prison camp. And it is during this trek that things about how Kiln life works, start to join up about and make sense to him. And it may not just help him overthrow the world view of the Mandate, but also possibly free the prisoners of the camp and answer the riddle about how civilisation rose and fell many times on Kiln.

This is now my favorite Adrian Tchaikovsky book. The writing is grippy, the narrator is wry, and I love the way the plotlines of revolution against authoritarianism and academic exploration of alien biology intertwine with each other.

Some extremely minor asides that I appreciated:

The narrator is quite funny and I appreciate the way he sometimes deceives the reader; there are several scenes where you get the surface level view of the scene and then find out shortly afterwards that he's also doing something furtive simultaneously.

I love that the authoritarianism is all about black and white binaries, and the book casually infers that one of the characters fell into political disfavor because they are some flavor of non-binary (without using that word, thank goodness).

This is also somehow the second academic adjacent alien book that I've read recently, with James SA Corey's The Mercy of Gods being the other. The power dynamic contexts are different enough that they end up taking different collaborator vs revolutionary approaches.