I’m running out of original or clever ways to say “Adrian Tchaikovsky’s new book is brilliant,” because A) there’s a whole lot of them, and B) they’re almost all brilliant. To be fair, they’re not all brilliant. Some are just at the lowly level of “excellent” and I can think of one that I would call a mere “pretty good.” But there’s no one out there that comes even close to matching his combination of quality & quantity.
This one is about an ecologist sent to a labour camp on a remote colony world. It’s a life sentence, as there’s no FTL travel and the ship that brought them there was built to break up on arrival. And it’s assumed that the life sentence probably won’t be all that long, as the planet of Kiln is extremely hostile to human life. Upon arrival, he learns a secret that the government has been keeping very tightly: Kiln holds ruins built by an alien intelligence, and the protagonist is going to be applying his skills as a scientist to helping to understand them.
There’s a second angle to this story. That one is about a society where the government enthusiastically embraces science, but a tailored, narrow view of science that serves to legitimize the existing hierarchy and the government’s mandate to rule. In this angle, the protagonist is an academic who was targeted for his mildly non-Orthodox work, lightly challenging the places where the officially approved science didn’t fit reality. He’s sent to a penal colony and required to solve scientific questions. This is an impossible task: to survive, he must provide the government with the answers they seek, but those answers must fit with what the powers that be know to be the truth. Simply telling the Commandant what he wants to hear won’t work, as the Commandant is enough of a scientist himself to ask follow-up questions. But he also won’t accept “wrong” answers either.
This is simultaneously a dazzlingly brilliant science fiction story and a clever, incisive commentary on modern police states (including the “police state lite” of a heavily surveilled society). This touches on the power of propaganda (to which no one is immune), authoritarian powers stratifying society to stabilize their position at the top of the pyramid, a government’s need for legitimacy in the eyes of both rulers and ruled, and the difficulties of meaningful resistance when the government is sewing paranoia about betrayal everywhere. References to 1984 abound.
It’s standalone, which I greatly appreciate these days, and, as I said at the beginning of this review, a very typical Tchaikovsky. Which is to say, it’s brilliant.
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