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I had the pleasure of designing the dust jacket for Adrian Tchaikovsky's 'Alien Clay', a book I had actually read and adored BEFORE I received the job offer!
Keep an eye out when this Subterranean Press edition comes out; more illustrations by an amazing artist within...
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Just finished Alien Clay, the new standalone novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Reads a bit like Annihilation meets Baru Cormorant. I've been on a real Tchaikovsky kick this year, and I think this one might be my favorite.
Far-future science fiction where political dissidents are put on one-way sleeper ships to lethally dangerous exoplanets as prison labor. The protagonist, Professor Arton Daghdev, has been shipped off to Imno 27g, colloquially known as "Kiln," as part of the Mandate's crackdown on "seditious" academia.
As one would expect from Tchaikovsky, the book is equal parts political screed and speculative biology worldbuilding exercise, both of which he knocks out of the park. Alien Clay is one of the more overtly radical Tchaikovsky books I've read so far – the story is divided into three parts, "Liberté," "Égalité," and "Fraternité," it's not exactly subtle.
I think this book rises above the rest because of the protagonist. Daghdev's first-person narration is playful, wry, and bitter all at once, and the core of his revolutionary ideas center around state control of the philosophy of science, more so than literal academic censorship. That's a subject I don't see tackled often in fiction.
If you're a fan of fungal body horror, political revolution, and academics who can take a punch, this is the book for you.
“Science, as a creed, should care about truth. … And on such hills I die. That doubtless sounds stupid, to you who tell yourself you will take up arms when they starve your children, when they rob you of goods, when they come for the demographic that includes you. But it’s deviation from the truth that lets them do these things. It’s the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won’t lift a finger, because they’ve believed the lies spread about you. It is the lies that starve your children because you believe the stories about general shortages, even though the grandees of the Mandate feast off gold plates every day of the year. And it is lies about science which cut most deeply, telling you that this or that group of people are naturally inferior, or another group has an innate ability to lead. That there is sufficient genetic distinction to make the call, when in actuality we share the vast bulk of our inheritance with mushrooms. Or else that, because of this kinship with mushrooms, our leaders are justified in keeping us in the dark and feeding us shit.”
adrian tchaikovsky, “alien clay”
Ok everybody go read Alien Clay
I have been whining about bad autism rep and my irritation at YA and along comes an Adrian Tchaikovsky with some of the best speculative biology/commentary on fascism and resistance/plot twists and foreshadowing/erudite narration but also uses the word yeet in a way that works/sci-fi horror with a happy and mind-twisting ending I have ever seen.
And Ilmus Itrin is the autistic character we want, need, and deserve.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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books I’ve read in 2025 📖 no. 034
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
“Kiln doesn't do death like Earth does. Kiln does life."
I like Adrian Tchaikovsky but he is so worried you won’t get his Themes and Allusions that he ends up explaining every joke and doesn’t let any description go un-annotated. And maybe it’s just Our Narrators Character but it does grind my gears a little.
Shout out to Adrian Tchaikovsky for including a nonbinary character, who uses exclusively they/them pronouns, in Alien Clay. This is of course Ilmus. This is great because hard sci-fi is such a male dominated sphere. He doesn’t feel the need to explain why Ilmus is non-binary, or even the need to make them a perfect person (they are on a prison colony after all). But also it explains how it puts them in a complex set of social strata without belaboring the point. In this genre, this is just such a breath of fresh air.
