Teaser

The Mandate has a special way of dealing with troublesome scientists. It sends them to Kiln, a world that is habitable, but not necessarily survivable. For on Kiln, evolution has taken a radically different course . . .

Review

Somehow, this book languished on my TBR for the best part of seven months. Frankly, that’s inexcusable. I don’t like to have any book hand around for that long, and especially not a book as good as this. After a return to fantasy with The City of Last Chances and a run of more traditional space operas with The Final Architecture trilogy, it’s wonderful to see Tchaikovsky heading back to what he does best: Standalone, idea-driven science fiction.

I’ll get into this more later on, but this is one of Tchaikovsky’s darker novels. The background features an authoritarian regime called the Mandate, which essentially controls all of humanity. Details on this are thankfully scarce (those oddballs among you who love dystopias may be disappointed, but I was overjoyed), but it is quite clear that the ‘criminals’ on Kiln are often guilty of no more than a difference of opinion. Tchaikovsky dips into the paranoid psyche of those who oppose such regimes, and spares no one. The prison colony/research facility is a bleak place, and I particularly appreciated Tchaikovsky shining a light on how science can be weaponised. After all, while science is usually portrayed as asking the right questions, some people are only in it to get the answer they want.

All of this could have been quite depressing, and overall the book has a very sombre tone. However, this is not just a book about man’s inhumanity toward man. There’s an alien planet to be explored. One thing Tchaikovsky has always excelled at is speculative evolution. One need only read the interludes of The Doors of Eden to prove that. Here he details the evolutionary processes of an entirely alien world. Whereas on Earth, evolution is frequently depicted as survival of the fittest, on Kiln, the evolutionary cycle is not so much modelled on competition as it is on collaboration. A loaded term in a book like this.

The flora and fauna of Kiln are fascinating, not least because of how little similarities it has to Earth’s lifeforms. Some of it put me in mind of Neal Asher’s Spatterjay, with every weird little grub hideously dangerous to human life. The mysteries of Kiln’s ecosystem is peeled back layer by layer, with each answer raising new questions. It’s a world that feels truly, utterly alien. No matter what names humans might apply, there are things on Kiln that are beyond human comprehension.

Which is where we get to the darkest part of the novel. Now, I will preface this by saying that my interpretation is not what Tchaikovsky intended. If Children of Time has taught us anything, it’s that Tchaikovsky has a broadly positive attitude to the idea of transhumanism. For myself, the outlook is a little more pessimistic. There is a moment towards the end of this book where we see Kiln’s life ‘collaborating’ with a human. We see first-hand how it folds humans into the ecosystem, how it adapts to us and how we adapt to it. I suspect Tchaikovsky’s interpretation of this is of an opening of the human mind. Of being open to new experiences. I might be wrong, but on a narrative level, the book seems to treat this as a positive development. However, my reading of it is different. I see this as an absolutely horrific situation. Of having something alien crawl into your mind and alter the way you think. Something that wants to spread to others, and is willing to sacrifice individuals for the sake of its whole. Even mailing those individuals lay down their lives willingly. If this is Tchaikovsky’s intended reading, then I applaud him. If I’m way off base with this one, it’s nevertheless a grippingly grim read. The fact that there is even a debate over the interpretation is proof of how good the writing is.

This may be a dark book, but it has been an absolute joy to be in the pages of a Tchaikovsky book. His fertile imagination shows no signs of slowing down, and I can’t wait for what he does next.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• Published by Tor in 2024
• 388 Pages