Culture clash

A couple of years ago, I got sucked into Adrian Tchaikovsky's breakout novel Children of Time. I've retained a fondness for it and some of the other books that he's written, like Elder Race. He's got a wonderful sense of time and scale that translates well to science fiction, and that's on display in (one of) his latest books, Alien Clay, in which he plays with big ideas about science and alien worlds, but also about how authoritarianism collides with reality and biology in ways that that their leaders don't always expect. It's also a timely novel in an age where we're living under grim events and ideologies.

Tchaikovsky introduces us to Professor Arton Daghdev, who had been part of a growing dissident movement against The Mandate, an authoritarian government that has taken over Earth, suppressing free thought and expression, and locking up those that step out of line.

Arton was a minor player in that movement, but nonetheless, he's imprisoned, put into hibernation, and shipped off to a distant habitable world called Kiln, where agents of The Mandate have set up a prisoner camp slash research facility. The planet is home to a strange ecosystem with some extremely puzzling signs of a vanished civilization. Those shipped to the planet are used as expendable labor in this hostile environment, and as conscripted researchers who're put to the task of trying to figure out what its deal is.

As it turns out, Kiln's life is really out there: it's biome has developed along a different path as Earth's, and rather than a Darwinian model, Kiln's life seems to be based a bit more on cooperation. Tchaikovsky spends quite a bit of time laying out the strangeness of this world's lifeforms, and the the weird structures strewn across the landscape, seemingly embossed with some sort of writing. The Mandate officials aren't exactly looking to colonize the world, but they are fascinated by it, and are looking for some sort of way to include it and its strangeness within their worldview.

This cultural collision is what forms the heart of Alien Clay: it's a book that picks apart the worldview of authoritarians and fascists: people who prize order and rules and can't reconcile those bits and pieces that don't fit within that framework. The people behind the Mandate can easily lock up and shoot into space those who disagree with or otherwise don't fit within their worldview, but when they're confronted by an alien biome that doesn't fit, they end up spending their time and energy battering their heads against a wall while they try and find ways to subsume it into it. When inflexible ideologies encounter something they can't (or refuse to) understand, they inevitably shatter along the cracks that form.

There's a tidy convergence here: the Mandate is imbued with this inflexible, authoritarian mindset and Kiln's lifeforms, with their cooperative evolutionary track, are completely antithetical to that. As Arton and his companions eventually discover, the biome here relies on interconnection, forming a not-quite hive mind.

Readers who picked up Children of Time will recognize this trick: in that book, Tchaikovsky's emergent spider civilization and humanity eventually collide, but end up avoiding all-out war because of some biological trickery that changes them on a deep biological level. The change makes them receptive of cooperation and collaboration, and it's framed as an evolutionary step for humanity: get over your selfishness and tribalism, and you'll be able to advance ever further into the universe.

Tchaikovsky is playing with some of the same themes here and it's a bit repetitive, especially if you've read some of his other stories. And the Mandate as an overarching antagonist feels a bit like any other authoritarian regime that you might have encountered in any number of dystopian stories. But it's not a bad journey, especially in 2025, where the world around us is demonstrating that not all slides into authoritarianism are subtle and set at a slow boil. Sometimes, you are getting hit over the head with the message.

What I appreciate the most about this novel is Tchaikovsky's dissection of authoritarianism and its approach to the natural world, which he sums up neatly in a passage toward the end: "It's not all about the Great Man theory of evolution over here, all those neat trees of life the Mandate produces, where human beings are the pinnacle of the uppermost branch, closest to God."

This is a theme that's echoed in everything from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park to Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation to Christopher Brown's A Natural History of Empty Lots to songs like AURORA's "The Seed": that we're a small part of a complicated, chaotic world, and that our attempts to tame or control nature can come back to harm us in unexpected ways.

Tchaikovsky often takes a long view in the worlds of his stories, often by necessity, showing that while empires and regimes arrive and take over, their rule is often short in the greater (galactic or planetary) scheme of things, often because they make themselves too fragile to endure the marathon of time. It's a useful lesson to internalize in an age where it seems that we're all too eager to roll back environmental protections in the name of economic progress. Hopefully, our current mistakes will end up being short-lived.