2024/041: Alien Clay — Adrian Tchaikovsky

2024/041: Alien Clay — Adrian Tchaikovsky

[the painting is] a kind of hell, except it was called 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'. The joke, I take it, being that it's a delight humanity is excluded from. Everything else in the picture's having a grand time living it up at our expense. Being on Kiln feels like that to me. I can almost hear the pop and fizz of the planet's biospehere having its riotous party... [loc. 3147]

Xenoecologist Professor Arton Daghdev has been exiled from the repressive and totalitarian Mandate for political dissidence. Alien Clay opens with his horrific descent through the atmosphere -- in a flimsy capsule, from a disintegrating single-use spaceship where he's been freeze-dried for the journey, watching as others die ('Acceptable Wastage') when their capsules fall apart -- to Kiln, one of only three planets yet discovered where multi-cellular life has evolved.( Read more... )