Vive la révolution!
Book review of a subversive nature
It’s hard to know if my reading habits have radicalized since January, or if the volume of contemporary “resistance lit” has simply exploded like a pipe bomb in recent months; or maybe a revolution is just like a yellow VW, once you’re in one, you see them everywhere.
But I’ve been on an anti-authoritarian literary tear lately—reading more than writing about it, because there’s an awful lot of such writing, and my hottest takes on current events are usually cold before breakfast.
The latest book in my resistance pile approached me in disguise: “Alien Clay,” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, is a sci-fi thriller of interstellar revolution, recommended to me by a discreet local bookseller who knows my tastes (we cut eyes in the back of the fiction isle, away from the cameras).
This story both begins and ends with radical awakenings, the first a terrifying descent through an unfamiliar atmosphere, speeding in a flimsy craft meant to disintegrate before disgorging its deported cargo, the enemies of Earth’s global autocracy.
In this version of the future, Salvadoran super-prisons are swapped for planetary penal colonies, but with the same expected outcome of permanent relocation with extreme prejudice.
Drop shipped from orbit in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag, heretical scientist Arton Daghdev faces a rude awakening as conscript of the all-powerful political machine called The Mandate.
This uber-reich seeks to punish the mid-career ecologist for his mild academic thought-crimes (science must serve the regime!) and other subversions with a life sentence on Kiln, one of a handful of distant planets where an unsettling, eldritch biota has been discovered.
“Les Mis” in space this is not, although it contains enough space opera conventions—interplanetary travel, epochal timescales—to give the story some gravitas.
The unfolding revolution on Planet Kiln is a multifaceted conflict that toggles between the intimate, interpersonal loyalties and deceptions of any resistance movement, and the ecological dynamics of competing biomes that border on warfare.
It is, for all its grand scope, a fast read and page-turning adventure that satisfied the likes of me (mild radical and biophile) on several levels.
Secret a copy into your private hideaway. Prepare to be captured, packaged, reconstituted in an alien landscape, and set loose with all your conservative hesitations into the ultimate pluralist nirvana.