“A world organized along completely different lines from Earth”…Alien Clay
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“Hard” science fiction exists to push the limits of imagination in a very specific way. So it's a thought experiment that starts with what's known and what's possible and then tweaks everything up to 11 to see what the world might look like.
This applies to all fields of science and even human life. In a sense, my novel is the authoritarian excesses of the Earth-based regime known as the Mandate. alien clay These are as much thought experiments as the bizarre life of the planet Kiln, where this book is set. It's just that there are fewer steps between the present and the future in this book, on the political side than on the biological side.
alien clay interacts with scientific knowledge in two very different ways. The first, and most obvious, is what's going on in the Kiln. Scientists in a prison colony there have the unenviable task of trying to classify and explain a world organized along lines quite different from Earth's.
That was my first “what if” question. It's very easy to take many things for granted and assume that some things on Earth are universal, but our dataset on “life” is just that. We know that Darwin's theory of evolution explains the interconnected diversity of life on Earth, but could life have gone in other directions? Or is a world of competition the only possibility? Is it?
in alien clay I have an alternative hypothesis to extreme symbiosis. In fact, much of what happens there is inspired by life on Earth. Because while the popular image of “survival of the fittest” focuses on “faster, stronger, tougher,” life tends to be more about how well you cooperate with your neighbors. It's from. .
As my protagonist Professor Arton Dagdev says, the basic unit of life is not individual organisms, but life as a whole. In Kiln, this interdependence is taken to an extreme, with each apparent organism or species being a complex of specialized parts working together, any part of which is part of any number of separate creatures. You may be caught doing that trick as . It's Lego evolution, and it's fit to piss off some poor geoscientist. Life by committee. This means that individual parts of the Kiln ecosystem are pre-adapted to be adventurous towards anything that attempts to intersect with them. The biochemistry of the kiln is different from the biochemistry of Earth, but if you want to interact on that level, it comes down to the shape of the molecules, the lock, the key. And, as the men of the prison colony discovered, life in the kiln is an innate lockpicker. their cost.
The other half of the scientific conversations that are taking place are about the political regimes under which scientists study, and that is why the reckless ecology of kilns is seen as a problem and not an opportunity to learn. This is the reason why it is considered. The Mandate cannot abide by anything that does not fit into its worldview, and its worldview is personified, and as the motto says, “The universe has a purpose, and that purpose is us.”
The Kiln is an affront to the Mandate's human-centered science, especially with its outlandish indication that the kiln's hodgepodge evolution has produced intelligent life. Arton, a dissident scientist, points out that even with power and guns, regimes like the Mandate always appeal to a higher power that authorizes violence and repression. It means they feel the need. It may be religion, it may be science, but in the most brutal regimes there is enough shame to justify their excesses and brutality. So while the Mandates expect scientists to make Kiln conform to their neat and universal views, Kiln's life sticks them in the nose a lot and refuses to oblige. Masu.
alien clay Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor) is the newest nominee for the New Scientist Book Club. Register here and read along
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Source: www.newscientist.com
