Hugos 2025: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky has his devoted fans— 2015's Children of Time, which I read for the first time last year, has many adherents!—but it's taken a while for him to break through into the Worldcon sphere and become a Hugo finalist. In 2022, he was a finalist for Best Novella, and in both 2023 and 2024 for Best Series. (In fact, he won Best Series in 2024, but disavowed his win once the issues with the Chengdu Hugo Awards came out.) 

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Originally published: 2024
Acquired: April 2025
Read: May 2025

This year, he's finally broken to to the big one... not once, but twice, as Alien Clay and his novel Service Model are both finalists. The first of the two I read was Alien Clay, a first-person novel about a biologist exiled to a labor camp on a recently discovered alien planet by an oppressive government. He must navigate the politics and personalities of his new environment, while also trying to understand the strangeness of this bizarre ecosystem.

I thought the novel opened very strongly, with an arrestingly written description of the pods carrying the political prisoners down to the planet. I liked the depiction of the prison colony a lot, and the discussion of the politics seemed pretty well done, especially the tension in how an oppressive government might see the value of science... but only if science affirms how it wants to see itself. It's a tension, all to unfortunately, that we've been seeing in the United States in 2025. I particularly liked the character of the prison warden, a man who sees himself as an intellectual but is still the instrument of a brutal, repressive regime. The biology is, I assume, well thought out, but well thought out biology doesn't interest me for its own sake.

Unfortunately, as it went on, I got less interested in it. I don't think protagonists have to have "character development" per se (surely an overrated idea among amateur critics if there ever was one), but I do think there needs to be some kind of interesting push-and-pull to them, a feeling of things being in tension that the narrative explores. I never really felt this with the narrator, who kind of just does his thing until the book ends. I wanted to feel like more was at stake for him. Specifically, he seems to be a guy with a bit of an ego (he is a scientist with a successful career, after all), but he's also part of a movement and undergoes a transformation that both seem like they involve denying the self somewhat, and I never really had a sense of conflict here—and surely that would be relevant to the novel's themes about how we need to learn to not see ourselves and our assumptions in what we study. (It is, to be honest, a bit Solaris-y, but Tchaikovsky goes in a very different direction to Lem or Tarkovsky, so I don't mind; sf is full of variations on themes.) By the end, despite the strong opening, I was a little bored, feeling like Tchaikovsky didn't totally deliver on the interesting ideas he set up at the beginning.