Hugo Awards Review #2: Alien Clay + Service Model
Our next round of Hugo Awards reviews is about two books on the Best Novel slate: Alien Clay (by Adrian Tchaikovsky) and Service Model (also by Adrian Tchaikovsky). Both myself and Gordon will be giving our takes on each. While Adrian Tchaikovsky is a friend of the podcast and an all-around great guy to talk to, we will not be pulling our punches; expect us to review him just as we would any other author!
Like last time, we will give each work a “Literary Rating” out of 10 and a “Speculative Rating” out of 10. The Literary Rating will be based on how well the story is written: imagery, sound, and characters, as well as the stylistic ambition of the text. The Speculative Rating will be based on the amount and quality of speculation (societal, technological, and otherwise) in the text and to what degree the story has a “reason for being”. These factors, as well as our overall enjoyment of the text, will be factored into an overall “Holistic Rank” within the category (provisional until all novels have been reviewed).
Both of us will be using a relatively harsh rating scale— please keep in mind that we are using 5/10 to mean “average” for a published short story, and 7/10 to mean a story that we actively like a good amount, not just feel neutral about. With that in mind, let’s get into the Best Novel nominees!
Alien Clay
After being deported to an extraterrestial labor camp for breaking with the scientific orthodoxy of his fascist homeworld, a disgraced professor learns that the strange alien ecosystem he finds himself in is not what it seems…
Adrian Tchaikovsky
G: Alien Clay is a book about life in a prison colony of a fascist regime on a planet called Kiln where evolution is overwhelmingly cooperative rather than competitive. The biggest strength of this book is the way in which its biological and political ideas reinforced each other. Every physically distinct “organism” on Kiln is an amalgamation of several species each fulfilling their own niche interdependent on one another.
Each organism can be thought of as similar to a modern city that has evolved far past the point where anyone could be fully self-sufficient. And similar to how although Chicago and Tokyo may both contain teachers, doctors, and plumbers, they are obviously different, many species on Kiln exist in a multitude of very different organisms performing a similar function.
Writing alien biology is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s claim to fame as a writer, and not for no reason. Kiln is teeming with beautiful and terrible lifeforms that make the environment feel simultaneously irresistibly welcoming and terrifying.
This decentralized cooperative ecosystem parallels the prisoners’ own need to form a similar interdependent system to stage a successful revolt. The commentary here suggests that to some extent our own interpretation of evolution to be competitive in general is overly applied with the most “fit” organism often being the one to best fill a specific role to benefit others in an ecosystem.
Despite all this some of the most interesting scenes for me were in fact some of the few non-action scenes in which the protagonist Daghdev speaks to the Commandant of the camp, who was my favorite character of the novel. The Commandant is a man who is committed to scientific discovery but with unshakable faith in the orthodoxic worldview of The Mandate. There is this tension in which he both wants Daghdev’s approval but also wants to ideologically convert and submit him. This relationship between the need for people in autocracies to have external validation of their beliefs and justification for their actions was another interesting theme which came up throughout the book as well as in our podcast discussion with Adrian Tchaikovsky himself.
Unfortunately I don’t believe that the style and structure of the book live up to its ideas. The prose is casual and sardonic, and while funny at times it often feels awkward, the tone of the narration clashing with the generally serious events of the story. Take this quote for instance:
And then the guards in their heavy suits are there, caught in that weird Schrödinger’s Thug situation, where they want to drag me about as painfully as they can while simultaneously not aggravating my condition to the extent it will lessen the impact of all the rest of the pain they have planned for me later.
—Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay
I think this is actually a pretty funny quote, and it would work well as a brief moment of levity in a torture scene. But when the book always has this tone, it becomes grating. There were several times like this where I felt a scene would have inspired a deep sense of wonder, awe, or horror from me had the emotional impact not been immediately undercut by a self-deprecating joke or sarcastic remark. It often felt as if the book was pulling its punches.
In addition, throughout the second section of the book the plot advances in a nonlinear fashion, with what I believe should’ve been the climactic sequence of the book being effectively spoiled ahead of time. The likely reason for this is to save this big climactic reveal for the end of the story, but by showing the events that happen afterwards it becomes blatantly obvious what has happened, so when we finally get around to reading it in the story it loses most of the impact it could have had.
The combination of these effects is to create a story which has far less urgency and tension than it should have. Alien Clay is an action-packed story of revolution and discovery on a brilliantly conceived alien world, with the protagonist constantly teetering on a knife-edge between life and death. It should be a page-turner. It was not.
If the events of the plot occurred in order, and some portions of the jokes were removed to allow the emotional beats to hit, I would have loved this book. Instead it is a book which I will continue to think about quite a bit and am glad I read, but did not particularly love while reading.
Literary Rating: 4/10 | Speculative Rating: 9/10 | Provisional Holistic Rank: 1/2
…let me tell you what you’re waking up into: actual hell. The roaring of colossal structural damage as the ship breaks up all around you. The jostling jolts as the little translucent bubble of plastic you’re travelling in is jarred loose and begins to tumble. A cacophony of vibration coming through the curved surface to you: the death throes of the vessel which has carried you all this way, out into the void, and is now fragmenting. There’s a world below that you know nothing about, not in your head right then. And above you are only the killing fields of space. The fact there’s a below and an above shows that the planet’s already won that particular battle over your soul and you’re falling. The oldest fear of monkey humanity, the one which makes a baby’s rubbery hands clench without thought. Such a fall from grace as never mankind nor monkey imagined.
—Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay
K: Given the title of Alien Clay, I was surprised that it begins in an alien sky, with the protagonist roughly awakened by cheaply-made spaceships disintegrating all around him. This disorienting scene really set the tone for the world of Alien Clay: a place where shit happens and its unlucky inhabitants have no choice but to take it in stride.
If I had to describe Alien Clay in a few words, I would say that it is like the sci-fi version of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. If you consider Annihilation to be science fiction, this might seem like an odd analogy. But hear me out: while Annihilation may feature science, it has very little faith in science to discover any truth about the world.
Annihilation’s world is lush and strangely beautiful but also impenetrable. Whenever any character attempts to use science to reach understanding, the result is confusion, disaster, or both. The ultimate implication seems to be that using science to unravel the mysteries of Area X is futile. To me, this fundamental lack of belief in science as a concept places Annihilation more in the genre of cosmic horror.
In contrast, Alien Clay too takes place in a lush, strangely beautiful and mysterious world (Kiln), but it also has a great deal of faith in science’s ability to understand the universe and better ourselves. The looming threat of an all-powerful fascist State trying to corrupt the scientific process actually allows for a great deal of idealism about science and the pursuit of truth, which I found quite refreshing. (For more of my thoughts on this subject, check out my latest essay on Chinese science fiction.)
The most important quality that I look for in a story is internal resonance— that is, to what extent the plot, setting, and themes work in harmony to make the narrative more than simply the sum of its parts. Many stories (whether they be television, cinema, or literature) have great elements that nevertheless don’t really elevate each other. But in Alien Clay, all of its constituent parts come together in a very satisfying way.
Specifically, every element in the story reinforces an anti-authoritarian and communal message that is expanded on at several points during the novel. Alien Clay begins in a highly atomized labor camp, but prisoner solidarity grows alongside revelations of Kiln’s cooperative alien ecology. The fascistic State of the novel, despite never being shown, becomes a great foil for the dynamics that emerge in the labor camp. And the narrator, a dissident scientist who is perpetually too prideful for his own good, makes for great ideological commentary on the events of the story.
All of this would not be possible without Adrian Tchaikovsky’s trademark strength: writing alien biology. Readers of Tchaikovsky will be familiar with the alien lifeforms of his Children of Time series, but I actually enjoyed his creations here even more. The ability to simply introduce short-lived aliens with crazy anatomy gave Tchaikovsky a lot of creative freedom to produce the stuff of dreams and nightmares. (Just wait until you come across the alien known as “The Elephant’s Dad”.)
They reminded me quite a bit of the animated critters in the HBO series Scavengers Reign, a visual feast that I would highly recommend watching in tandem with reading the novel. It made me better able to visualize the mechanics of some of Tchaikovsky’s stranger lifeforms (although I must admit that I still had a lot of trouble). Tchaikovsky himself even admitted some of the (coincidental) similarities on our podcast.
Stylistically, I had mixed feelings about this novel. I tend to dislike overly colloquial prose in stories set in the indeterminate future because of the suspension of disbelief required, so I had to pause for a bit every time I came across a 2010s-ism like “yeet”. I didn’t feel like the climax of the plot was as gripping as it could have been, and I just felt like the quality of the writing in general was a bit uneven.
But the silver lining of this unevenness is that Alien Clay has moments of real literary flair. There’s the aforementioned opening sequence, as well as unexpectedly evocative and humanizing passages like this one:
He’s across the far side of our little huddle of bodies— big-spooning for Ilmus actually— but I feel like he’s standing over me. I’m weirdly aware of him, in a way I’ve only ever been when, as a much younger man, I was at a party with someone I was achingly in love with. I will tell you up front, I am not in any way in love with Vertegio Keev. But still, I’m so keenly alive to him being there, awake, brooding. His years, weariness and disappointment. With life, with everything.
—Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay
Alien Clay is not a perfect novel, but it is a novel that I enjoyed quite a bit. I really enjoyed Alien Clay, and I think any fan of sci-fi will find something for them inside.
Literary Rating: 7.5/10 | Speculative Rating: 9/10 | Provisional Holistic Rank: 1/2
Service Model
After inexplicably killing his master, a robot who only knows how to be a valet travels across a post-human wasteland to find his true purpose.
Adrian Tchaikovsky
G: Service Model opens with a robotic butler Charles (later Uncharles) in the aftermath of his inexplicable murder of his master. He then embarks on an adventure which generally follows a repetitive sequence of events:
Uncharles comes to a new location seeking a purpose or at least employment
Uncharles toils in his (at least to the reader) obviously pointless and ridiculous job
Eventually things go to shit and Uncharles leaves to go elsewhere repeating the process
This sequence of events repeats itself in a number of different settings, which I believe is intentionally somewhat tedious and repetitive. The essence of the story is about this push and pull between Uncharles’s deterministic, robotic self-image and his occasional agentic actions and the Wonk’s belief in his sentience and free-will. The result is a story in which lessons learned that are obvious to the reader remain elusive for Uncharles, who is inherently slow to change due to his programming.
Conceptually I think this structure makes sense, but for it to work as a story it requires each of the settings to feel unique and imaginative to get through the monotony and predictability of the general events. I think a couple of the settings do succeed at this. In particular, I thought that the library section was incredible, but for the most part the setting was not quite intriguing enough to compensate for the repetitive nature of the story and I was often bored.
The sentience and free-will of the Uncharles (and the robots in general) is generally kept ambiguous. When Uncharles “experiences” emotions it is written as follows:
The thing he couldn't really be described as feeling now was "unhappy," but he was aware of the concept and could construct a table of comparisons highlighting similarities.
— Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model
While quotes like this serve to keep the necessary ambiguity in regards to the sentience of Uncharles, at a certain point saying this every time he “experienced” an emotion became quite tedious.
While all of the robots must work within their given directives to complete their task list, there is often some amount of wiggle room here and Uncharles (and several other robots) often maliciously comply with demands made of them in a way that clearly signifies desires outside of the completion of their task list. It felt reminiscent of playing a D&D character where I may do something that I want to do but come up with a justification through the tendencies and goals of my character. The robots often behaved similarly, having a clear internal will which they then had to justify through their listed directives.
So most of the robots seemed to land pretty clearly on the side of having some amount of sentience and agency, and this never felt satisfactorily explained in the novel.
At its heart, Service Model is still a comedy, and while it is constantly riding a balance between being comedic and boring, there are quite a few repeated gags I found consistently funny. My favorite of these being Uncharles’s conviction that his only murdering one of his masters will surely not be that big of a hit to his future employment prospects.
He was, he considered, very employable. He was used to providing very high levels of service coupled with a very low, albeit nonzero, level of murder.
— Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model
Overall, I found Service Model pretty average. It had some fantastic moments, but was also kind of a slog to get through. You know what you’re going to get with this book, and can probably tell whether you will like it just from the first couple pages—or even just reading the quotes in these reviews.
As an added note I listened to the audiobook for Service Model which was narrated excellently by Adrian Tchaikovsky himself, so I would definitely recommend the audiobook if you are interested in reading it.
Literary Rating: 6/10 | Speculative Rating: 5/10 | Provisional Holistic Rank: 2/2
K: Service Model is… tedious. This may sound like a negative assessment of the novel, but I mean this in the most value-neutral way possible. The extent to which you enjoy Service Model is likely going to depend on how much you enjoy its particular brand of tediousness, which in the best case is really quite entertaining.
This story follows the valet robot Charles, who is designated “Uncharles” after the death of his master. Nearly half of the many interactions in Service Model take the form of a bit in which Uncharles says some very human-y statement in very robot-y language, which causes other, less sophisticated robots a great deal of consternation. And the other half of interactions take the form of a bit in which Uncharles frustrates his human companion known as “the Wonk” with his limited robot understanding.
This can range from very funny to very annoying, depending on your mood. I felt that Service Model operated as a mood ring of sorts— when I was feeling good, I would find these interactions to be funny and endearing, but when I was feeling down, I would just want the book to be over with. One bit that did always hit, though, is the fact that every robot response had to begin with “No, Uncharles.”. The absurdity of a standard “No, <X>.” response having to accommodate a name as ridiculous as “Uncharles” was just really funny to me.
Another highlight of Service Model was a series of playful exchanges about paradoxes, which felt just as fun to write as it was to read:
“Wait, no!” the Wonk exclaimed. “If you travel anywhere then you have to go halfway towards it and then halfway again and then again so you never actually get there! How about that? That means, by logical calculation, your goons can’t ever get to me!”
Again there was a faint flickering of the lights as the Chief Librarian considered this. “In which case,” he told the Wonk, “we will just proceed halfway towards a point as far beyond you as we are currently away from you, and by that expedient will be able to seize you on our way to that point. After which we will amend our objectives to removing you to a point twice as far away as had previously been intended, and abandon you halfway to that destination.”
“Yeah, okay,” the Wonk said, and Uncharles reckoned that if she had visible lights they’d have been flickering themselves as she tried to follow the logic.
—Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model
I really enjoyed reading parts of Service Model like this one, but I have doubts about the final product. With its current tone, I think Service Model would have worked better as a short, light-hearted novella that revels in the absurdity of its premise. I think Service Model could also have worked better as a more ambitious novel that pivots to a more serious tone halfway through (like the creepy prequel story “Human Resources”). Instead, Service Model feels like a satirical novella with a bloated final section tacked on, which didn’t really hit for me. I couldn’t get invested in the final beats of the story, in part due to the absurdity of everything that came before it.
The biggest weakness of this book was the unclear nature of Uncharles’ sentience (or lack thereof). This might not be a problem if you don’t think about it too hard, but the book really couldn’t decide if it wanted robots to be sentient or not, and the ultimate “reveals” at the end were extremely unsatisfying. I was hoping for a more interesting explanation of how the robots ended up the way that they did1, but the mechanics are basically just hand-waved away. I would care less if Service Model committed to a more lighthearted story, but instead I found it increasingly hard to suspend my disbelief as the final act unfolded.
In the end, I think it will be pretty obvious how much you will like Service Model after reading the first couple pages. This could be an endlessly entertaining book for the right person, but I would hesitate to give it an overall recommendation.
Literary Rating: 6/10 | Speculative Rating: 5/10 | Provisional Holistic Rank: 2/2
Conclusion
In the end, I (Kevin) have Alien Clay as an early frontrunner, while Gordon has a less enthusiastic view. Service Model didn’t make a huge impression on either of us, but of course whether it ends up closer to the middle of the pack or the bottom really depends on how much we like the rest of the slate!
For more thoughts on Alien Clay, you can listen to our podcast episode with Alien Tchaikovsky himself! Tune in next time for our reviews of The Tainted Cup by R. J. Bennett and A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher. Thanks for reading!
One idea that I thought of while reading is that it would be super cool if the Wonk turned out to be a product of Uncharles’ imagination, being the manifestation of Uncharles’ nascent human sentience (sort of like in Westworld, or the theoretical artificial sentiences proposed by Douglas Hofstadter) rather than an actual human. This would also allow the world to be completely absent of humans (more thematically in-line with the final act), while still allowing for a similar kind of human-robot dynamic. Just a thought!
The "Schrodinger's Thug" bit makes no sense and is just bad writing. Tchaikovsky doesn't seem to understand the Schrodinger's Cat paradox.