Alien Clay

Jan 17, 2025 | newscientist.com | Adrian Tchaikovsky |Alien Clay

They say never start a story with a waking, but when you’ve been hard asleep for thirty years it’s difficult to know where else to begin. Start with a waking, end with a wake, maybe. Hard asleep is, I am informed, the technical term. Hard, because you’re shut down, dried out, frozen for the trip from star to star. They have it down to a fine art – takes eleven minutes, like clockwork. A whole ship full of miscreants who are desiccated down to something that can . . .

Jan 17, 2025 | newscientist.com | Adrian Tchaikovsky |Alien Clay

“Hard” science fiction exists to push the boundaries of the imagination in a very specific way: thought experiments that start with the known and the possible, then dial everything up to 11 to see what the world looks like. This works with any area of science, or indeed human life. In a way, the authoritarian excesses of the Earth-based regime known as the Mandate in my novel Alien Clay are as much a thought experiment as the bizarre life of Kiln, the planet on which the book is set.

Apr 10, 2024 | newscientist.com | Emily Wilson |Alien Clay

In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, prisoners live on a hostile alien worldGremlin/Getty ImagesAlien ClayAdrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)Service ModelAdrian Tchaikovsky (Tor, out 6 June)British writer Adrian Tchaikovsky has not one, but two new novels out in the first half of this year. That may be due to the vagaries of publishing, rather than evidence of exceptional productivity. However, Tchaikovsky is certainly prolific: his backlist is as long as your arm.

Mar 1, 2024 | newscientist.com | Alison Flood |Alien Clay

From Adrian Tchaikovsky to Hao Jingfang and Natasha Pulley, a host of big science fiction names have new titles out this month. We readers can choose if we want to peer into the ruins of an alien civilisation, follow the possibility of a coming singularity and its fallout or enter the world of a sex robot – to all of which I say,  yes please, bring it on.

Aug 24, 2023 | panmacmillan.com | Christopher Paolini |Patrick Ness |Adrian Tchaikovsky |Alien Clay

Alien Clay is a thrilling far-future adventure by acclaimed Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky. The planet of Kiln is where the tyrannical Mandate keeps its prison colony, and for inmates the journey there is always a one-way trip. One such prisoner is Professor Arton Daghdev, xeno-ecologist and political dissident. Soon after arrival he discovers that Kiln has a secret. Humanity is not the first intelligent life to set foot there.