Book completed

Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m afraid this book read too much like a thought experiment. For the first two-thirds of the book, almost, we just endure life on a penal colony planet – our narrator is an exobiologist who would have been quite professionally interested in the way this planet’s life works differently from Earth’s, except that he’s condemned to labor and die out here. There’s no real narrative suspense, because we have no sense that something could be done about his situation (life under totalitarianism is bad), and he’s not particularly likeable anyway. Then, suddenly, he and some of the others do have a major problem to address, and although he tells us right away that they do solve their new problem (getting back to the camp from a considerable distance), we also get to see how maybe they’ve solved their larger problem, either by emulating the way life works on this world or by becoming infected with enough of this planet’s molecules that they’ve now changed enough to make a difference. (Our narrator insists that he is no different biologically, he just sees things differently now, but he doesn’t seem entirely reliable in that regard, which kind of undercuts the point of the story.) It’s interesting, but it doesn’t really work as a story for the reasons I’ve described, nor as an allegory of standing up to totalitarianism, since the solution is essentially an upbeat horror story. I did like his metaphor of life on Earth as authoritarian at the individual level, where we want and need our bodies to have some centralized control over what’s going on internally, rather than just being a hodgepodge of symbionts like they are on this world, which is a more democratic system.

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother’s Day to all of the other mothers, or anyone with maternal feelings in one way or another! I got nice text messages from B and D, and I watched the livestream of this week's Delgani concert (Caroline Shaw, the Shostakovich with the creepy knocking, and Beethoven 59/1). Around 5:30 pm D came over with a cute card of a sleeping kitten and yet another prayer plant to add to my kitchen window collection. I had tried to order from our neighborhood Italian restaurant but they were only doing pizza and calzone today, so instead we had a delivery from Pastini, which was very tasty. We then finally got to see Flow! So pretty, although a bit confusing at key points. Then I drove D back to his apartment to see how they’ve decorated, since I hadn’t gotten to visit it since soon after they’d moved in, in September (despite driving past it almost daily). S was at her K-pop dance rehearsal, having seen a Spongebob musical with her mom earlier in the day at the high school where the latter teaches.

Then back at J’s house, I read some, and watched him play a bit of Nordhold, then we watched two more episodes of Frieren, an exceptionally pretty anime series. A relaxing day!