And that’s it. We’re down. I look up into an alien sky.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s stories have made multiple appearances at Pixelated Geek, and this year he has two books nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel (Jeez, Adrian, save some for the rest of the class.) For this book we return to a favorite theme of Tchaikovsky’s, revolution, with a planet-spanning Earth government called The Mandate, and the disillusioned academic Arton Daghdev who’s become a secret political dissident by standing up for scientific self-determination.
He gets caught, of course. Imprisoned, interrogated, and sentenced with zero due process, he’s sent on a one-way trip to a labor camp on another planet. The book starts with Arton’s deportation already in-progress as he wakes up from suspended animation, disoriented and screaming as the transparent pod he’s sealed inside plummets to the ground. He and all the other convicts aboard his ship arrive on the planet Kiln after a thirty-year journey, chucked from orbit in a process that’s only mostly survivable. Not everyone makes it alive; Arton already knows that the Mandate only cares if a rough majority of the convicts survive to continue the work that will eventually kill them anyway. “Acceptable Wastage”, as Arton refers to it. After all, everything’s recyclable.
The clothes and plates, the chairs and blunt cutlery, it’s all at least partly reclaimed people. As is the food.
Arton has, as you can imagine, a very cynical outlook. On everything. Any idealized views he had about revolution have been stomped to death with jackboots, and he’s smart enough to not just see what’s happening on Kiln, but the why of every decision The Mandate makes. He’s a very wry, self-deprecating storyteller, speaking in artful metaphors and turning things like a description of bacterial infection into a saga. And even though everything he says is relentlessly in the present tense – horrible things happening now now now – he’s also speaking from some point in the future where he knows how it all turns out, so there’s a lot of ominous foreshadowing.
The sense I get from Anton is that he’s holding onto his sanity by the shreds of his sense of humor, kicking his past self for being so damn naive. At the same time? He’s never going to stop resisting. And no matter how bad things are for human life on Kiln, a tiny bit of him is gleeful that he’s seeing first hand what The Mandate has been covering up; that there was once a thriving alien civilization on Kiln, the first extra-planetary race ever found. This discovery also comes with a puzzle. The mysterious race left behind zero tools, or bones, or fossils, or any other sign that they were ever there, other than empty buildings covered in indecipherable writing and a thick covering of Kilnish life.
And Kilnish life? Is weird.
The entire planet is a thick jungle, and the distinction between “plant” and “animal” is fuzzy, or maybe even nonexistent. I don’t want to go into too much detail about just how crazy things are, since you really need to experience the immersive descriptions about out how things work unspoiled. Suffice it to say, the relationship between different organisms on Kiln make the relationship between a stomach and a tapeworm look about as distant as a form letter. And it’s happening right down to the molecular level. The entire labor camp is under a sealed dome, there are decontamination procedures for anyone who goes outside, all food is either shipped in from Earth or produced in matter-printers that are fed only Earth-sourced recycling (including people) to make sure not even a molecule of Kiln biology makes it into the food supply. If anyone is ever tempted to forget why all of this is important, there’s an infected howling thing being kept under glass to remind everyone that an alien infection is a bad thing.
There are shades of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation in places. The vines around the ruins are covered in alien flowers and can strangle intruders. Trees slowly move to better locations. There’s a nightmarish scene where something that is most definitely not an elephant – but come on how else are you going to describe it and look out it’s coming your way – manages to trample unlucky convicts and eat them with teeth in the bottom of its feet
I also saw quite a bit of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris in the scientists’ attempts to study and classify things that defies classification. There’s something ridiculous about using human terms and methods to study something that’s so utterly outside anything humans have seen before. But Anton and the other scientists don’t have any choice, because this is one more element of The Mandate’s control. The Mandate already has the Answer, and the job of science is to come up with the results that confirm the Answer is correct. Kilnish biology, the vanished civilization, the history of the planet Kiln itself, it all has to fit the mold that The Mandate created, with humanity as the pinnacle of creation. Arguing that the Answer is wrong, or even failing to come up with a good explanation for how it’s right will get you sentenced to the worst jobs, or outright executed. The leaders of The Mandate have surrounded themselves with so many layers of loyalists and yes-men that their reality doesn’t include the fact that anyone saying “no” will lose everything, so for them “no” doesn’t even exist.
The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you’re even wielding it.
Yes, there is a lot here about all the ways repressive governments work, and how they systematically destroy resistance. I ran out of room to save all of my favorite quotes; Arton has a lot of time to reflect on how The Mandate plays on people’s paranoia and fear. The way they divide and conquer, pointing out the other, inferior population and blaming them for everything while the leaders quietly take more than they need. How innocent people can be swept up in purges without any pushback, because if you know that you can do everything right and still get hauled away, the first survival instinct is to be even more obedient and hope the monsters never have a reason to notice you exist. And none of it is by accident; the cruelty is exactly the point, and it’s all mathematically calculated to make sure that everyone is suffering enough to keep them demoralized, but not so much that they decide death by fighting is better than a slow death under someone’s heel.
Arton’s choices are down to resisting and being made an example of, or continue the work that has a 100% fatality rate – for a commandant who’s never going to accept the truth – or a sad combination of the two if he ends up getting killed by a former comrade who’s sure he sold them out. And then…something happens. This is where things get really interesting, because the story is now told in two parts. On one track you have Arton and his fellow convicts moving forward with a new reality that you can only barely see the shape of. And on the other you see everything leading up to the change and everything it means. Tchaikovsky plays out both of these little by little, putting the reader in the place of the baffled leader and guards because they find out what’s really going on at about the same time that we do.
The discovery of the secret to the Kiln civilization comes simultaneously with Arton’s discovery of everything about himself, his relationships, all the betrayals and shocking moments of Unreliable Narrator. The weirdest revolution in the world circles back to an echo of the very start of the book, and the unsettling feeling that the story ends right at the point where most alien-world stories begin.