enneđź“š reviewed Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (duplicate)
Alien Clay
5 stars
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. …
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.
