Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

(Tor, 2024)

Reviewed by Susan Peak

Since 2008, Adrian Tchaikovsky has had 49 books published, with a further three, possibly four, due to be published in 2025. He is a one-man publishing phenomenon, and, remarkably, his writing is consistently high-quality, mostly SF with some fantasy.

Professor Daghdev has fallen foul of The Mandate, a, or the, governing group on Earth, and he has been exiled, along with other dissidents, to a planet nicknamed Kiln. This planet has alien life on it of a very strange sort, which The Mandate has set up as a unit to explore and report back on. Kiln is in effect a prison planet, and the unit is the prison itself.

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Review from BSFA Review 25 - Download your copy here.