Review: Alien Clay

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Adrian Tchaikovsky is incredibly prolific; this is his second book released this year (the other I've read is Service Model ) and there's one more I have to track down. He has written some of my favorite science fiction of the past few years, including the excellent Final Architecture trilogy.

This book, following the whimsy and small-scale stakes (but still quite good) of Service Model, returns to his usual modus operandi of big stakes and world-altering ideas. If that's the kind of SF you go for, this book should be right up your alley. It's also stuffed full of fascinating alien biology, and the author's version of the so-called "Gaia hypothesis"--what if there was a world-mind (an alien one in this case, not Earth)? What would that look like, how would it have evolved, and how would it behave?

Most importantly, how would humans fit into it?

It's just how ants make decisions. Or how our brains do, on a deep neuron-to-neuron level. These are shunted up to the conscious level of our minds to become attached to justifications and rationales. It's not a hive mind, in the popular conception, because that implies some top-down direction controlling all its component parts. Ants and neurons are democracies, that old political saw the Mandate works so hard to discredit.

There's a great deal of philosophy in this book along with the science. The Mandate, mentioned above, is the political entity seemingly controlling all of Earth in this future, and the Mandate is the one who sends its rebels and revolutionaries, including the protagonist Professor Arton Daghdev, to Kiln as a one-way trip. The prisoners will explore the planet and the long-lost (or so they think) alien civilization found there, and they will never return.

"They call it Scientific Philanthropy," I say, naming the doctrinal elephant in the room, "which is nothing to do with giving to the needy and everything to do with being given to by creation. Orthodoxy says we're here to observe the universe, because the fine tuning of the universe is such that it's a perfect incubator for a human-style intellect. For humans in general. The laws of nature and the cosmos encourage conditions that give rise to life as we know it, and that life was always going to become us. Hence, we were meant. It's manifest destiny all the way down."

But on Kiln, life developed in an entirely different way: based on cooperation and symbiosis instead of competition and specialization. Life there swaps out its parts the way humans change clothes, and the various parts recombine to make all new organisms and species. And when humans join the mix, Kiln works to make them part of its web too. Not to assimilate them, like Star Trek's Borg, but to incorporate them into the whole so the whole can survive--and, as we find out, use humans' differently evolved brains like routers, to awaken the biology and ecosphere of Kiln to sentience once again.

This is not a book to rush through. It has more ideas in a few pages than most SF books have in their entirety. The characters do suffer a bit because of this, as it's obvious where the author's focus lies in this story. But if you want your science fiction to have that old-fashioned "sensawunda," I haven't read a better book for that this year.

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