Alien Clay

A book offering a revolutionary angle, championing class solidarity and mutual aid, set in an authoritarian regime's prison camp on an alien world. Rivetingly written from the perspective of a lead protagonist, a professor eloquent yet not aloof, who I couldn't help but like and root for. Exciting examination of a character forced to work for a system they find fundamentally wrong and doing everything they can to subvert it. The imagined world and its alien ecosystem is just interesting, reading like a critic of the human race and how its majority do things. Just as the described authoritarian regime mirrors the one most of us live in. I would give this book 6/5 if I could.

2/3 so bleak and depressing that it was a struggle to get through, 1/3 exactly the kind of revolution porn that makes me love Tchaikovsky so much.

Probably the most /him/ of all his books I've read so far, but not the most fun of them.

This is now my favorite Adrian Tchaikovsky book. The writing is grippy, the narrator is wry, and I love the way the plotlines of revolution against authoritarianism and academic exploration of alien biology intertwine with each other.

Some extremely minor asides that I appreciated:

The narrator is quite funny and I appreciate the way he sometimes deceives the reader; there are several scenes where you get the surface level view of the scene and then find out shortly afterwards that he's also doing something furtive simultaneously.

I love that the authoritarianism is all about black and white binaries, and the book casually infers that one of the characters fell into political disfavor because they are some flavor of non-binary (without using that word, thank goodness).

This is also somehow the second academic adjacent alien book that I've read recently, with James SA Corey's The Mercy of Gods being the other. The power dynamic contexts are different enough that they end up taking different collaborator vs revolutionary approaches.

Another great Tchaikovsky take on the truly alien, this time with added revolutionary fervor. If you like near-to-mid-future scifi rooted in existing social issues and aliens that aren't just humans with weird foreheads, Alien Clay is for you!