Adrian Tchaikovsky's ALIEN CLAY

"Everything that our biological sciences say can't be here on Kiln, his archaeology says is here. Or was."

I'm passing familiar with gulag narratives, having read my share of Solzhenitzin, Dostoevsky et al; enough, at any rate, to be pretty sure nobody really needed to tell the Czars to hold my beer: they were plenty bad as already recorded, thanks.

But nobody told that to Adrian Tchaikovsky, apparently.

The basic idea of Tchaikovsky's latest, Alien Clay, is, what if gulags but we also demanded that the inmates perform original almost-scientific research on a bizarre alien biome full of life forms that are not only hostile to humans but also just incomprehensibly strange, ridiculous kluges of forms so complexly interdependent/mutually exploitative/indistinguishable that they call the very Idea of speciation and taxonomy into question. 

Also that "almost-scientific" is important; the Mandate, aka the human space empire from which our prisoner/researchers have been dispatched, is a totalitarian state run by powers who have a skewed, religiously-tinged idea of what science is even for, which is finding and promulgating only that evidence which supports the Mandate's pre-ordained conclusions about how the universe works and about humanity's place as the pinnacle and point of all creation.

Oh, and there's xeno-archaelogical evidence, in the form of strange gigantic structures that reminded the first visitors to this nightmare planet of kilns, hence the name bestowed, unofficially of course, on the planet: Kiln. This Must Be Investigated by (pseudo) Science, or at least appear to have been investigated even though the conclusions about what these ruins are, what kind of beings built them, what they mean for humanity, are pre-determined.

So our exiled convict-scientists' primary job is to present the Mandate with evidence supporting the conclusion that somehow Kiln once supported some kind of humanoid life that built the weird structures. They have to demonstrate how these humanoids evolved and how they're basically humans because nobody else could make structures like these kilns. And woe betide anybody who even sort of suggests otherwise -- never mind that there's no sign of anything remotely human-like ever having lived on Kiln -- let alone discloses that life on Kiln operates on principles that are pretty far from the good old descent-with-modification we know from terrestrial evolution.

So I guess the elevator pitch for this book must be something like: Jeff Vandermeer meets Alastair Reynolds meets China Mieville. With maybe a little bit of Greg "Blood Music" Bear thrown in toward the end.

That China Mieville bit is not a third wheel, by the way: most of the convicts laboring on Kiln have been banished for revolutionary activity, actively organizing against the Mandate, not just occasionally publishing slightly subversive ideas. And they've brought a wealth of that kind of political experience with them to Kiln; much of Alien Clay's first third or so concerns covert activity on the part of our narrator and his fellow political prisoners against the evil and manipulative Commandant of the teeming hellhole where they're expected to spend the rest of their lives. Entertainingly, we are never privy to any of their actual planning or preparation; we see them doing seemingly inexplicable, covert actions and only understand why when actual revolution breaks out. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A revolution story on a weird prison world would be plenty interesting on its own, but what really makes Alien Clay so special, such an exceptional read, is the speculative biology of Kiln, which our narrator describes visually as "a forest of body horror just quietly going about its business." Everything our convicts encounter on this planet is a macro version of the true nature of our own bodies that we try so hard not to think about; truly, we are weird teeming assemblages of diverse other creatures, right down to our cells. The mitochondria that power those cells were originally independent single-cell organisms, just captured and harnessed ages ago by slightly bigger single-cell organisms. Our guts are host to vast colonies of microbes that help us digest our food; our skin is home to a myriad of mites that eat our dead cells, etc. 

On Kiln, in Kiln, that is all scaled way up. As our narrator observes on the dissecting table even before actually getting to explore any of the planet's lushly weird surface, what his masters keep trying to describe as species are anything but:

Not "species" -- the specific combination of symbionts that make up this particular visual signature, which all exist independently elsewhere with other partners, as though the entire biosphere is one big polyamorous love-in. If it'd been them coming to us they'd have been appalled at how repressed, one-note and boring all us Earth types are.

And of course it all turns out to be way weirder than that.

Tchaikovsky keeps all of these plots and revelations in exquisite balance while also providing the kind of intense character drama that a good gulag story requires. Many of the inmates were colleagues of various kinds back in the Mandate proper, who were expertly manipulated by the regime into distrusting each other long before they got shipped out in one-way deathtraps to work themselves into early -- I would normally say graves but since Earth and Kiln biology are wildly incompatible, human corpses would not decompose properly if buried on Kiln, so I'll say an early recycling, with all the nastiness that implies. There are some staff here -- supervising scientists who are not convicts but, being willing to serve out large chunks of their careers on this hellworld, they're not the best and brightest the Academy has to offer; security guards to keep the convicts in line, usually violently; and, of course, a Commandant who rules over all with all the brutal and manipulative flair that the Mandate has made into its one true science, but who also fancies himself an actual scientist, just like his slaves. And there are some in-between figures to keep everybody, including the reader, guessing.

I've read a lot of really great books this year, despite not having written posts about very many of them, but of them all I think Alien Clay is a candidate for my favorite, both among those published this year and among those older ones I have read this year. I snoozed on Tchaikovsky for a long time, but I shall do so no longer!

Addendum one day later: D'oh, I just realized that Alien Clay is pretty much a prequel to the Southern Reach trilogy!

100 Books #110 - Nicholas P. Money's TRIUMPH OF THE FUNGI: A ROTTEN HISTORY

When the author gets out of his own way and just lets us enjoy his material, Triumph of the Fungi: A Rotten History is as interesting and entertaining a book on the subject as one could wish. From Dutch Elm disease to the Potato Blight, Money surveys the history of fungal plant pathogens and their economic and aesthetic impact on the landscape in just the right amount of detail; one feels like a mycologist but isn't having to slog through a lot of soil chemistry data, which is enormously appealing to a lay reader like me.

What isn't appealing is a prevalence of what I can only describe as authorial snottiness; Money lets his personal opinion intrude on his storytelling just enough to be annoying, if not downright offensive: in his speculations about the origins of Dutch Elm disease, for instance, he tells us "I'm all in favor of blaming the Chinese, but in this instance they seem faultless"; pages later, describing the efforts of an early pioneer in research on a disease that all but wiped out coffee production on Ceylon/Sri Lanka, a pioneer who just happened also to be a reverend, he describes him as "a curate with presumable devotion to Christian superstitions" for really no reason at all other than to sound like a jerk, it feels like (to this reader, anyway).* Honestly, I can't believe an editor let stuff like this slide. Once I noticed this tendency, I couldn't stop seeing it, which often spoiled my enjoyment of a book for whom I am exactly the audience.

This is especially frustrating because the book is also full of fascinating bombshells of insight, as when Money points out how the results of a lot of early researchers in to Dutch Elm Disease had their results pretty much ignored because they were women, and a lot of dumb theories and ideas that came from men got credence, "frustrated progress in understanding the nature of the problem." Or when one Thomas Lipton -- yeah, that Thomas Lipton -- saw opportunity on Ceylon and started buying up rust-fungus-ruined coffee plantations to grow cheap tea on.* Or that "Plant pathologists can serve a [sic] excellent vectors of fungal disease." Or that the chromosomes packed into the zoospores of the potato blight fungus contain around 22,500 genes (for comparison, human chromosomes encode around 24,000).

See? Fascinating!

And we won't even talk about the chapter on chocolate. Oh my!** (Well, okay, maybe a little "...imagine massively swollen gentials in response to an infection of  your pituitary gland and you'll grasp a human analogue of this plant disease.")

But then the obnoxiousness makes a return in a chapter about fungal pathogens on rubber trees, in which the author makes as many condom jokes as he possibly can and throws in one about an exporter waiting anxiously for a rubber stamp in a colonial office. Har.

Overall, though, this is a great read. I especially appreciate the criticisms of modern agriculture that are gently buried in this text: fungal disease epidemics only really happen in monocultures; the bigger the plantation**, the bigger the problem. And while Money (wonderful name for a writer about economic threats such as these, eh) never says it outright, really, the worst thing that ever happened to these plants we exploit isn't really the fungi; it's us. Or maybe we're the best thing. Maybe these plants, like some have said that maize/corn does, are actually exploiting us, giving us a little something useful in exchange for our efforts to spread them, keep them bug and disease free, and in general let them take over the earth at the expense of other plants not "smart" enough to provide something we find useful or tasty?

And then, maybe, aren't the fungi the really smart ones, since they've let us humans do all the work of setting them vast banquet tables for them to enjoy?

Lots to think about, when we think about fungi, no?

*Oddly, the victim of this barb, Rev. Miles Berkeley, gets spoken of in seriously glowing terms later in the book. So, you know, why even make a remark like that in the first place? Once I got to the chapter wherein Money describes Berkeley as a "great man" all I could think about was this stupid dis earlier in the book. ARGH.

**And this after Lipton got into the retail business after his family fled the potato famine in Ireland, so "it might be said that Lipton was an improbable beneficiary... of two of history's worst fungal epidemics."

***Theobroma cacao... food of the gods, threatened by, among other things, Witches' broom/escoba de bruja.

****Some nicely subtle digs at slavery there, too.

100 Books 72 - Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's THE 10,000 YEAR EXPLOSION: HOW CIVILIZATION ACCELERATED HUMAN EVOLUTION

I actually read this book a while ago. I try not to put too much significance on the fact that I'm only blogging it now. The 10,000 Year Explosion is a fine book. It covers a subject I'm genuinely interested in. It makes an argument that I do find compelling.

But, like with Sex at Dawn, I'm probably very much a singer in the choir this book is preaching to.

It is always seemed obvious to me that human beings are still evolving. We talked in middle school about how our earlobes and pinky toes seem to be disappearing, physiological variations among ourselves, the uselessness of the appendix... So I don't find the argument that evolution did not stop when species Homo sapiens sapiens first thought to bang the rocks together, guys, to be at all controversial.

Nonetheless there's lots of neat stuff to explore here. The authors do a wonderful job of pointing out just how much we been able to learn about ourselves due to modern advances in the science of genetics. The study of genetic drift, the research into just how much Neanderthal DNA we might all still have, how certain have come to prevail in certain human populations, is all quite fascinating.

For instance, I am lactose tolerant because early herders in the steppes of Eurasia somewhere gave rise to a genetic sport who was able to keep drinking milk into adulthood, who thus thrived and produced just enough offspring to let his mutated gene drift into the population. Human migration and the fact that were not as a species really completely monogamous help to spread and become commonplace among my ancestors.

I love that I can drink milk eat yogurt (which I quite enjoy making myself) and have bones so strong that no bicycle crashes yet broken them. I am descended from a long line of stupendous badass evolutionary successes. And so are you.

Unfortunately none of my ancestors developed any helpful mutations that make me well-suited to sit in an office frantically typing and mousing (mousing with two hands by the way) for 10 hours a day. The people who do will own the future and have an obligation to have a lot of unprotected sex. For the good of the species.

But meanwhile, someone smarter and maybe a little more patient than I am, heritable traits perhaps both, developed the software I'm using to create this blog entry.

Dragon, baby: when you can't afford to wait for evolution.

100 Books 63 - Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's THE 10,000 YEAR EXPLOSION: HOW CIVILIZATION ACCELERATED HUMAN EVOLUTION

Short version: No, humans did not stop evolving 10,000 or even 4,000 years ago. We still are, in lots of fascinating little (and big) ways. And sadly, no, not all people are created equal. As many of us have inherent biological advantages as disadvantages -- and some people have both all at once. Interesting read, but I am pretty much part of the choir Cochran and Harpending are preaching to.

Long version: will try for an AudioBoo later this weekend. Typing is still to be kept to a minimum.