Stories about prisons and prisoners are not new, and that’s as true in the realm of science fiction as it is in real world fiction (and horror, and fantasy…).
But in his sci-fi prison novel Alien Clay (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), author Adrian Tchaikovsky throws in the added wrinkle of having the central prisoner be a professor and xeno-ecologist (and, uh, political dissident) while the prison happens to be a place friendly to his area of expertise.
In the following email interview, Tchaikovsky discusses where he got the idea for this story, and the idea of making the main character a man of science.
To start, what is Alien Clay about, and when and where is it set?
Alien Clay is not so much “first contact” as “worst contact” — from both the human and the alien direction. Kiln is a world where evolution has thrown up a community of symbiotes, so that every individual creature is a sort of LEGO of different creatures, each one performing some service for the whole, and all of those parts can also be found doing their thing as elements of entirely different creatures, so the whole world is this bizarre partner-changing dance of shifting and changing and devouring your relatives. This extends even to the microbial level so that the life starts busying trying to assimilate human biology as soon as humans are foolish enough to turn up.
On the other hand, the humans who turn up are convict laborers, political prisoners sent to an extrasolar gulag by a brutal and oppressive regime. The regime demands one thing of its personnel and its prisoners: discover who were the people of Kiln. For Kiln is dotted with ruins, but nothing of its voracious life seems qualified for any kind of sapience…
Where did you get the idea for Alien Clay?
Alien Clay has two very distinct inspiration points: the alien and the human. The alien came first, in that I wanted to write a book about a planet where, rather than just having new aliens in and of themselves, I wanted to write about an evolved system that worked differently to Earth ecology. The thought experiment was “Can I devise an alternative that comes over as plausible?” When envisaging alien creatures and worlds the temptation is always to do some variation of familiar Earth life, and just carry principles and features over. However, on that note, there’s a colossal amount of weird interspecies stuff on Earth, and our alien worlds are often very “normal” compared to that. Kiln really just leans hard into that sort of detail.
The main character is Professor Arton Daghdev, a xeno-ecologist. Is there a reason he’s a xeno-ecologist as opposed to a xeno-geologist, or, conversely, just an ecologist from Earth with no specific training in alien worlds?
Narratively, Arton needs to be a specialist so that I can get all the scenes where the commandant is giving him the time of day towards the start. Despite being a dissident, he needs to come with a value attached to him, to put him at the center of events in the beginning.
Also, the “Xeno” gives his internal monologue a bit more authority — and that’s basically the entire narrative of the book. The world of Kiln is also all about the ecology. It’s the precise academic standpoint that’s most useful in trying to decipher how it all works, or at least to work out how weird the planet actually is.
In deciding what the prison planet Kiln would be like, did you consider other prison planets in fiction, such as Rura Penthe from Star Trek or William C. Dietz’s novel Prison Planet?
A lot of prison worlds are very barren. It makes sense dumping your convicts in a wasteland where they’ll just die if they wander off. Rura Penthe is like that. I don’t know the Dietz at all, I’m afraid.
As it happened, of course, the world came first, and its use as a prison planet came about when I considered how humans would react to such a place, and what sort of humans I wanted to write about. Kiln is a world that seems terrible — the ecology itself is the bars of the cage — until your perspective on it alters, or gets altered, by exposure to it…
Also, should we read anything into the planet being called Kiln when there’s a space prison in Marvel comics called The Kyln?
I mean, Marvel comics has been going for some decades longer than I’ve been alive, so I suspect they’ve used just about every combination of consonants and vowels for something. It’s not something I’d come across.
Alien Clay is a hard sci-fi story. Some people don’t like hard sci-fi because they think it can be too technical. How technical, or detail oriented, does Alien Clay get, and why was this the right amount for this story?
I can promise that at no point does the plot hinge on a square-jawed astronaut-scientist coming to a revelation about an abstruse element of engineering or physics. There is a certain amount of detail about how ecology works, because as usual I’m most occupied with the bioscience end of things, but hopefully nothing that’s a bar to comprehension or enjoyment. The interposition of Arton as a narrator hopefully rounds over any rough edges.
Alien Clay is not your first book. Heck, it’s not the first book you’ve put out this year, which we’ll get to in a moment. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Alien Clay, but not on anything else you’ve written?
Probably just about everyone I’ve ever read, because that’s how it goes.
How about such non-literary influences as movies, TV shows, or games? Did any of those things have a big influence on Alien Clay?
Honestly the biggest influence is general science reading; my growing understanding about how intricate and weird living systems can become was a real driver when I was imagining Kiln.
Alien Clay sounds like a stand-alone story. But since you never know, I’ll ask: Is it?
I have an odd relationship with series. I’ve only ever written three sets of books that were envisaged as a series from the start (most recently The Final Architecture). Other than that, I tend to write a book, and if it does well enough and the ideas come, I’ll write another stand-alone book that builds on it. Each book therefore has its own self-contained story, but progresses the development of the setting. This is how the Children Of Time and Dogs Of War books work, for example. Hence if there is a good enough follow-up idea, another Kiln book is definitely possible.
Now, as I alluded to earlier, Alien Clay is not the only novel you’ve put out this year. Back in June you released a humorous sci-fi novel called Service Model. We did a deep dive on it back in June, but for people who feel clicking links is immoral, what is Service Model about, and when and where is it set?
Service Model is about a robot valet who really, really just wants to do his job by setting out his master’s clothes, arranging travel plans, and making the tea. Two obstacles present themselves: one being that he’s just inadvertently murdered his master, and the other being that human civilization is collapsing and nobody wants tea any more. It’s a book about robotic logic, where all the things we’ve made to do tasks for us are still trying to perform their functions in the ruins of our society.
As I said, Service Model is humorous. Who do you feel had the biggest influence on that aspect of the story, or if not an influence, whose writing do you feel is most similar to what you do in Service Model?
I’m not going to say that I write like Douglas Adams, because nobody does, but this is the closest to Adams that I’m ever likely to get.
And do you think people who like Alien Clay will also enjoy Service Model, and vice versa, or are they just too different?
I’d like to think that most of my readers will like both books, but it’s always a Venn diagram. In my experience, though, most readers are flexible and will devour quite a range of work.
Going back to Alien Clay, earlier I asked if it was influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Alien Clay could work as a movie, show, or game?
I’m tempted to say it could be the greatest movie David Cronenberg never made.
Yes, I think with sufficient budget you could definitely make something gloriously spectacular with it. Recently I’ve been catching up with Scavenger’s Reign, which feels quite adjacent in the idea-space it occupies, so maybe animation would be a good call? A game might be more difficult, but one of those first person narrative games (The Last Of Us sort of thing) might work well.
And if Cronenberg did want to make an Alien Clay movie, who would you want him to cast as Professor Arton Daghdev and the other main characters?
It’s a tough call. Sometimes I have actors in mind as reference, when I write, but Arton is more the voice. In my head he has an Irish accent, and maybe someone expressive like Aiden Gillen, whom most people know as a villain from Game Of Thrones, but he’s enormously charismatic.
So, is there anything else someone might need to know about Alien Clay?
I think I’ve spoken a lot about the alien, less about the human. So it’s a story about authoritarianism and oppression, and how you can resist that. Specifically, worming its way through the story is an examination of the curious way that tyrannical regimes always seem to need a higher power to reference, to justify their existence. It doesn’t matter if they have all the guns and power, an appeal to science or religion or some similar outside force is needed to cope with the innate human understanding that such things are unjust. On Kiln, part of what breaks the oppressors is that the world itself will not cooperate and give up the scientific answers they need.
Finally, if someone enjoys Alien Clay, and it’s the first book of yours they’ve read, which of your other novels would you suggest they read next?
I think probably Children Of Time and that series, or else wait a year and pick up Shroud in 2025, which is another book about a hostile (but very different) alien world.
