“A world organized along very different lines of Earth”… Alien Clay
Science Photo Library/Alay
“Hard” science fiction exists to push the limits of the imagination in a very specific way: thought experiments that start with the known and the possible, then dial it all up to 11 to see what the world looks like.
This works with any field of science, or human life. In a way, the authoritarian excesses of the Earth regime known as the Mandate in my novel Alien Clay They are as much a thought experiment as the strange life of the Kiln where the book is set. It’s just that there are fewer steps between the present and the future of the book in its political side than in its biological side.
Alien Clay he is talking to scientific knowledge in two completely different ways. The first – the most obvious – is what’s going on in Kiln. The scientists in the prison colony there have the unenviable task of trying to classify and explain a world organized along very different lines from Earth.
That was my initial “what if” question. It is very easy to take a lot for granted and to think that some things on Earth are universal, but the data set of our “life” is exactly one. We know Darwinian evolution It explains the variety of life on an interconnected Earth, but could life have gone any other way? Or is this competitive world the only option?
In Alien Clay I propose an alternative to extreme symbiosis. In fact, much of what happens there is inspired by life on Earth, because the popular image of “survival of the fittest” focuses on “faster, stronger, tougher,” and life tends to be about more than how you work with your neighbors. .
The basic unit of life, as my protagonist Professor Arton Daghdev says, is all life, not the individual organism. In Kiln, this interdependence is taken to the extreme, as each apparent organism or species is a composite of specialized parts working together, any part of which can be found doing its trick as part of any different creature. It’s the evolution of Lego, fit to drive Earth’s poor scientists crazy. By commission of life, individual parts of the Lab ecosystem are pre-adapted to be adventurous in what they try to cross. Kilnish biochemistry differs from Earth’s, but if you want to interact on that level, it suffers from molecular forms, locks and keys, and Kilnish life is a natural key collector, as the humans in the prison colony have discovered. their cost
The other half of the emerging scientific dialogue is the political regime in which scientists work, and because of this the mad ecology of the Lab is seen as a problem and not an opportunity to learn. The mandate cannot tolerate anything that does not fit into its worldview, and its worldview is anthropomorphic – “the universe has a purpose, and the purpose is us”, as the motto says.
Kiln is an attack on Mandate’s human-centric science, especially with crazy signs that Kiln’s delicious evolution created intelligent life. The point that Arton – the dissident scientist – makes is that, regardless of the power and weapons they possess, regimes like the Mandate always feel the need to appeal to some higher power that enables their violence and oppression. It may be religion or it may be science, but there is enough shame in the most brutal regime that they need to justify their excesses and cruelties. Therefore, the Mandate looks to the scientists to fit the Kiln into their universal vision, and the life of the Kiln gives them its many noses and refuses to force them.
Alien Clay Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor) is the latest choice for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read with us here
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