Jun 20

Jun 20 Alien Clay

About the book

Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Orbit

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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My Review

Alien Clay is my first book by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I picked it up because it’s nominated for the Hugo Award this year. Tchaikovsky is a giant in the sci-fi space, and it’s easy to see why. This is objectively good storytelling that is unfortunately not well aligned with my taste in books — I just don’t love hardcore alien world scifi. So it’s not a new favorite, but I enjoyed it enough to easily finish it!

The story is about a man named Arton Daghdev, a scientist who has been shipped off to the alien planet of Kiln as a laborer for life as punishment for political dissidence. Kiln is littered with sophisticated archaeological ruins, and everyone at the settlement is working to answer one question: who built them, and where did they go?

This has all the great ingredients you need for a great sci-fi novel: intriguing central mystery, good pacing, exciting ending. You just have to like alien stories, too. It’s also obviously a very timely book, with commentary on the current state of the world, from fascism to climate change. I do think it bopped around in time in a way that felt a little chaotic, in service of heightening the mystery, but I forgave it.

I’m intrigued to read Tchaikovsky’s other Hugo nominee (he has TWO this year!) to see if it was this book or just his style that didn’t fit my taste. We will see!