“A world organised along very different lines to Earth” … Alien Clay
Science Photo Library/Alamy
“Hard” science fiction exists to push the boundaries of the imagination in a very specific way: thought experiments that start with the known and the possible, then dial everything up to 11 to see what the world looks like.
This works with any area of science, or indeed human life. In a way, the authoritarian excesses of the Earth-based regime known as the Mandate in my novel Alien Clay are as much a thought experiment as the bizarre life of Kiln, the planet on which the book is set. It is just that there are fewer steps between the now and the future of the book on its political side than on its biological side.
Alien Clay is in conversation with scientific knowledge in two quite distinct ways. The first – the most obvious – is what is going on on Kiln. The scientists in the prison colony there have the unenviable task of trying to categorise and explain a world organised along very different lines to Earth.
That was my starting “what if” question. It’s very easy to take a lot for granted and assume that some Earth things are universals, but our data set for “life” is precisely one. We know Darwinian evolution explains the interconnected variety of Earth life, but could life have gone any other way? Or is that competitive world the only possibility?
In Alien Clay I hypothesise an alternative of extreme symbiosis. In fact, a lot of what goes on there is inspired by Earth life because the popular image of “survival of the fittest” focuses on “faster, stronger, tougher”, whilst life tends to be more about how well you work alongside your neighbours.
The basic unit of life, as my protagonist Professor Arton Daghdev says, is all life, not the individual organism. On Kiln, this interreliance is taken to extremes, as each apparent organism or species is a composite of specialist parts working together, any of which parts might be found performing its trick as part of any number of separate creatures. It is evolution by Lego, fit to drive the poor Earth scientists mad. Life by committee, meaning that the individual parts of the Kiln ecosystem are pre-adapted to be adventurous in what they try to intersect with. Kilnish biochemistry is different to that of Earth, but if you want to interact on that level, it comes down to molecular shapes, locks and keys – and the life of Kiln is a natural lockpicker, as the humans of the prison colony have found to their cost.
The other half of the scientific conversation that’s going on is the political regime that the scientists are working under, which is the reason why the madcap ecology of Kiln is considered a problem and not an opportunity to learn. The Mandate can’t abide anything that doesn’t fit into its worldview, and its worldview is anthropomorphic – “the universe has a purpose, and the purpose is us”, as the motto goes.
Kiln is an affront to the humanocentric science of the Mandate, especially with the maddening signs that Kiln’s hotchpotch evolution produced intelligent life. The point that Arton – the dissident scientist – makes is that, no matter their possession of the power and the guns, regimes like the Mandate always feel the need to appeal to some higher power permitting them their violence and oppression. It can be religion or it can be science, but there is just enough shame in the most brutal regime that they need to justify their excesses and cruelties. Hence, the Mandate looks to the scientists to make Kiln fit into their neat universal view, and the life of Kiln thumbs its many noses at them and refuses to oblige.
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor) is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here
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