Book Review: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

They travelled into the unknown and left themselves behind . . .
On the distant world of Kiln lie the ruins of an alien civilization. It’s the greatest discovery in humanity’s spacefaring history – yet who were its builders and where did they go?
Professor Arton Daghdev had always wanted to study alien life up close. Then his wishes become a reality in the worst way. His political activism sees him exiled from Earth to Kiln’s extrasolar labour camp. There, he’s condemned to work under an alien sky until he dies.
Kiln boasts a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem like nothing seen on Earth. The monstrous alien life interacts in surprising, sometimes shocking ways with the human body, so Arton will risk death on a daily basis. However, the camp’s oppressive regime might just kill him first. If Arton can somehow escape both fates, the world of Kiln holds a wondrous, terrible secret. It will redefine life and intelligence as he knows it, and might just set him free . . .

I first started listening to the audio version, but I got confused with character names, so I switched to the Kindle version. I always get a bit overwhelmed when I encounter character listings at the beginning of books. I understand it’s done for accessibility, and it’s helpful when reading on paper, but it’s mostly useless (and overwhelming) when listening to the audiobook, and not necessary when using an ereader (I love highlighting things or searching for characters’ names). I see this tendency of including a character list is a slowly increasing one, for accessibility reasons, but whenever I see one, it makes me think that I’ll have to remember a long list of characters, and I tend to shudder. It wasn’t the case here, so in hindsight, I applaud that it was included for the people reading on paper.

The book starts at the beginning but also in mid-res, as the story is told from Professor Daghdev’s point of view, and the first sentences are of him falling from the sky to Kiln, an exoplanet, just after waking up from a special kind of cryogenic sleep (a very bad kind). This made me care about Daghdev from the start, but it was also confusing because everything was so strange and unexpected. There’s the typical made-up jargon that we can find in any sci-fi story, and very weird things that inhabit this planet. To read this book, one should open one’s mind to avoid accepting things at face value and make an exercise in imagining the strange things Tchaikovsky describes. Because if we know one thing, it’s that Adrian Tchaijovsky can be amazingly original. This book is a good example.

This book could also fit in the category of dystopia, and our protagonist is one who participated in the revolution and was punished with a one-way trip to hell. This won’t stop him from trying to do his bid even in the most remote of places, where he will continue fighting an oppressive system. Even if you don’t care enough for Daghdev, which I understand can happen, due to Tchaikovsky’s ability to craft morally grey characters, you can then want to root for those who fight for a better future.

Many parts of this book remind me a lot of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, so strange and suffocating is nature in Kiln. It’s a bizarre book, hard at times, but it also has great moments of euphoria that had me rooting for the revolution.

lomeraniel

My name is Elena. Since I was a little child I loved science fiction and fantasy, and I can’t resist a good novel. In 2015, while wait I started to listen to audiobooks and I discovered the pleasure in being able to read while doing my daily tasks, so there’s always an audiobook playing on my phone. If you see me with my Bluetooth headphones on, please be gentle, I get easily startled.

I live with my boyfriend, which I met during my six-year stay in Belgium, four cockatiels, eight lovebirds, and a hamster in Madrid, Spain; and I like to spend my free time knitting and sewing while listening to audiobooks.