Play Book Tag discussion

‘There’s writing too, Professor Daghdev. Not translatable, obviously, but writing, decoration, art. For the first time, evidence of true thought evolved on another planet, in another solar system entirely.

The writing on the walls of alien temples that can be found underneath the virulent biosphere of the planet Kiln, if translated, would spell something like the titles of the three parts of the novel:

Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite

This is a book about revolution: molecular revolution and political revolution. The way the author weaves together the two concepts that are in fact one is clever and daring, not a surprise to fans of Adrian Tchaikovsky. An easy five star for the ideas. The way these ideas were translated into a plot and the characters didn’t work as well for me: too much exposition/info-dumps in the first half, too little action. The second half has both planetary exploration and actual conflict, but they feel forced, shoehorned into the core message of the novel to the detriment of both the actors and the actual science. At least to me, it seems here that the scientific theories are always twisted to serve the political message, exactly the thing the main narrator, professor Anton Daghdev, decries in the social regime that sends him to a work gulag on the most dangerous planet discovered so far.

Adrian Tchaikovsky studied zoology and psychology at university in England. Both have served his fiction work immensely. His passion for the natural world, in particular spiders and marine invertebrates, is one of the reasons I always look forward to his unusual and original concepts about alien species and about the future of humanity.
The focus in ‘Alien Clay’ is on molecular biology and symbiosis, as in different species cooperating for a better chance at survival. On Kiln, the evolutionary results are both baffling and spectacular.