I picked up Alien Clay because I like Hugo nominees and I like Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Adrian’s great love is hideous nonhumanoid aliens, either buglike or tentacle-based or both. He relishes the biological details, from the properties of humanoid skin, to the lifecycle of terrestrial fish parasites.

How could an ecosystem develop so that for example grasping limbs were actually symbiotic creatures? He’s just super enthusiastic about this sort of science fiction question. He wants to visualize these things, like a high schooler doodling alien monsters in his notebook.

There also also humans around. It’s an authoritarian dystopia. The bad guys sound like Effective Altruists. No, sorry, it’s completely different. They’re “Scientific Philanthropists.”

Their justification for doing everything they do is that they have a logical, rational piece of thinking, which means it’s the best way to do things for the greatest number of people. So they love science, because it gives them permission to do all the shit they do. Right up to the point someone puts together an inconvenient but cogent argument that gets in the way of how they want the universe to be. They want very specific answers from science. Black and white answers to complex questions. Everything sorted into predetermined boxes.

At first I was surprised to see this critique, because Adrian Tchaikovsky seems very pro-shrimp. But his critique is less about shrimp welfare, and more about the problem of expecting too much from rational reasoning. Promising certainty when you don’t have certainty, and then becoming unable to admit you were wrong, corrupting what should have been your intellectual principles.

They spend way too much time performatively writing memos.

Would Tchaikovsky actually care about shrimp welfare? I think no. Shrimp yes, but welfare no. He seems to be keenly aware of the rules of the animal kingdom, and to respect those rules in a deontological way. If anything he wants to raise the status of shrimp. Not to rank species “according to how close to human they are.”

I think the author fantasizes about being infested with alien symbiotes and turned into some sort of bug monster. If you have this fantasy too, you should read this book. Otherwise, I did like the book, but I think Tchaikovsky’s best is Children of Time followed by Children of Ruin, so I would start with that series, and read Alien Clay if you want even more.

The “human dystopia” part of the story is okay, but it feels like he started with the aliens and worked backwards to the prison planet. The plot needs an excuse for why a cutting edge biologist would be doing lots of manual labor.

If you’re interesting in reading a novel set in an authoritarian prison camp, you should read Life and Fate instead. Real prison camp stories seem like the offenses were often completely trivial or nonexistent, and that has its own sort of horror, the evil springing up out of nothing at all. In Alien Clay, most of the prisoners actually had been planning a violent rebellion, albeit in a young adult Disneyfied way. “On the day of the uprising I personally didn’t carry a gun because that isn’t my style but I was still super important and helpful.” Nobody who is pointlessly denounced, or never figures out why they were there.

In the end, I feel like he doesn’t really answer the question he poses. Why would an alien ecosystem evolve so that tentacles were symbiotic creatures that could install themselves into anything that needed an extra tentacle? I still don’t know. But I think Adrian Tchaikovsky has some more novels in him, ready to grapple with this fundamental question.