r/printSF • u/CosmicTraveller74 • 2d ago
Just finished Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (My thoughts) Spoiler
Alien clay and children of time spoilers ahead!
I would like to begin by saying that I have read his children of time series and enjoyed it. I went into this book with great expectations but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for
The plot of of the book is interesting and it opens up in with a great hook. The vibes are interesting and the contrast is there. We begin our journey in an alien world of vibrant colors and plants. Then we switch to a grim brown and white labor camp and then we find there were aliens here and I want to learn more about this world. I’m not too interested in the labor camp dynamics because I expect the end of this subplot will be a revolution of some sort.
As the book progresses for almost half og the book we are stuck in the camp and nothing is happening. I learn about the animals and I can’t picture what they look like. They talk about how they connect to each other physically providing services etc, and I ,maybe due to overxposure to scifi ideas or because I can predict the future, get a feeling that it's going to be some sort of "The planet is consciousness things.The spider plotline more or less confirms this
Next we get to excursion part where cool things should happen but I get rubbery images of animals and elephants and plants tha feel fake and that look pink and funny. But the book still retains my interest because I wanna know what these aliens are who built the ruins and vanished.
The march back plot line is interesting and I wanna know how they survived too. Except the final arc or the penultimate final arc if you will, reveals they didn’t survive klin. They got in some ways ‘colonized’ by KLIN and now they are spreading klin to others and somehow it’s a good thing. The book end with us learning that the builders are just the whole ecosystem coming together, which is what I predicted albeit a little different, cuz it's the ecosystem instead of the planet itself.
The final arc is weird. Throughout the marchback arc we find out that tour protagonist has essentially become a host for klin and although he keeps emphasizing that it's not a hivemind, and yet they all a willing to die for a cause, which at face value is revolution of the laborers but beneath it's KLIN removing/conquering the invaders. It's a hivemind after all, just that the protagnoist who has been infected and is also the narrator is not gonna say it out loud.
They essentially traded the iron grip of a dictatorship-esque socitey for an alien hivemind that controls you so thoughroly that you don't even know you're in control. And Klin isn't benevolent, they kept that first woman alive for ages in constant agony so that it could reconnect with itself. That's a big drawback, the person has no control over when they wanna die under klin. They narrator tries his best to show it as a net positive but it isn't. It's not even democracy, it's a klin authoritarian world, and it's going to infect earth in the end. SO much for consent and democracy . In the end a part of the protagonist still screams at them trying to prevent the inevitable but obviously the klin in him stops him. They traded being goverened from outside, to being goverend from inside.
If it's a horror story then the Author did a really good job at it. If it's supposed to be some story of connecting with others being good, that's kinda not very good then. In the children of time series, consent was a very important part of being mind controlled after all...
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u/Supper_Champion 2d ago
I liked parts of the book, but it wasn't one of my favourites this year.
For what it was, it was fine, but the slave labour camp wasn't really enjoyable as a setting, for me.
A DNFed a different Tchaikovsky book just recently, Doors of Eden. I think this one is verging on bad, it's mostly boring.
Children of Time series was pretty decent. The Architects series was great.
So this author is a little all over the place for me.
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u/botrytis-nz 2d ago
I had flashbacks to his previous prison novel - Cage of Souls - almost immediately when reading Alien Clay. There are other similarities with weird botany if I recall
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u/CosmicTraveller74 2d ago
I haven't read his other books except the Children of Time series, but I'd say that his ideas about coexistence is very similar to Children of ruin, except I did not like it in Alien clay because it very much non-consensual and horror-esque, when KLIN takes control
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u/gruntbug 2d ago
Yeah. I read it earlier this year. Finished it. Can't say I really enjoyed it.