Wild Truth

This post was written by Coleman Numbers, a Humanities Center student fellow. 

 

“I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.”

Joseph Smith, 1851

Why is so much science fiction concerned with totalitarianism?  

This question has infected me since I started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest novel, Alien Clay. It’s not the question I expected to wrestle with, at least not the main one. Tchaikovsky has made a name for himself in the science fiction community by imagining exotic aliens—his novel Children of Time, which won him the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Series, is told from the perspective of a race of sapient spiders. In keeping with Tchaikovsky’s earlier work, Alien Clay features an alien ecology that is to Earth biology what improv jazz is to European symphony music.   

I was surprised, then, when the book led me to issues closer to our pale blue dot: how does authority distort the exercise of power? How do individuals decide between the pursuit of truth and the preservation of self? Can ideology be alloyed with insight? And what does the speculative genre itself say about these questions? 

 As it turns out, several possible answers to these questions might lie in the simple fact that Alien Clay is, like all good science fiction, about human beings trying to reconcile themselves to truth out in the wild. Alien Clay shows us how any human paradigm’s encounter with truth leads to the (at least partial) explosion of that paradigm. The consequences of that explosion are often political, and rarely comfortable.  

In Alien Clay, ecologist Arton Daghdev arrives on Kiln, a prison planet designed to punish political dissidents with back-breaking labor in a volatile alien biosphere. Like the dissident heroes of N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984, Daghdev finds himself on the wrong end of a tyrannical regime with religious commitment to certain ideas. The consequence, for Daghdev, is the crushing boot of the fascistic Mandate.  

As in these other stories, Daghdev struggles against brutal inhumanity and brute irrationality. No surprise there. But unlike other protagonists in totalitarian dystopias (I’m thinking specifically of 1984), Daghdev faces a regime that welds scientific inquiry to state dogma. Characters representing the Mandate’s power, like the planetary commandant who is equal parts prison warden and citizen scientist, want to contribute to science—to the extent that science agrees with their doctrines.  

As Daghdev explains, this impulse is motivated by totalitarian ambitions: “[The Mandate’s] justification for doing everything they do is that they have a logical, rational piece of thinking, which means it’s the best way to do things for the greatest number of people. So they love science, because it gives them permission to do all the [stuff] they do.” 

Unlike 1984’s Ministry of Truth, which destroys opposition by forcing opponents to assent to “2+2=5,” the Mandate of Alien Clay derives their authority from an ostensible commitment to absolute truth. Anyone who opposes the Mandate, then, becomes an enemy to the sacred truths of “orthodoxy,” a word which comes up a lot in Tchaikovsky’s novel. 

You can already see how Alien Clay helps me to answer the question I posed at the top—“why is so much science fiction concerned with totalitarianism?” The most effective, terrifying regimes aren’t the ones that avoid the truth, at least on their face. They are the ones that use an absolute truth, an ironclad orthodoxy—whether that be scientific, religious, economic, or otherwise—to justify force. If you’re an enemy of The Truth, then we can go no holds barred. We can do whatever it takes to defend The Truth. 

But then, this kind of orthodoxy is a mirage, even if it isn’t as obvious as “2+2=5.” And that’s because real science and real inquiry don’t lead to neat orthodoxies; they explode them. Asking questions with real intent leads to revelation—and revolution. So it shouldn’t be surprising that science fiction, that genre so interested in the possible, the unexpected, and the expansive, can’t help but confront the enemy of the revelatory and the revolutionary—unchecked orthodoxy.  

This tension between orthodoxy and truth-seeking is exactly what the world of Alien Clay presents. The Mandate’s core doctrine is “Scientific Philanthropy”: a cosmological view in which the universe is “a perfect incubator for a human-style intellect … The laws of nature and the cosmos encourage conditions that give rise to life as we know it, and that life was always going to become us. Hence, we were meant. It’s manifest destiny all the way down.” It’s an atheistic creation myth that deliberately misreads evolutionary processes to justify human supremacy—including the supremacy of some humans over others.  

The trouble with the planet Kiln is that local life just refuses to conform to anything like an Earth standard. Because of how different organisms on Kiln can link together in ad-hoc symbiosis like LEGO pieces, biological ideas as simple as “species” break down. The narrator grasps for earth-like analogies, and comes up short, as when he tries to describe a Kiln “elephant”: 

I mean, not an elephant, but I swear to you that’s what I see…Admittedly no elephant has eyes on stalks like that. Plus the fact that it lollops along on three extending and contracting pillar legs is a bit of a giveaway that what’s come to remonstrate with us isn’t your average pachyderm…the main body of the thing is a pale mouldy green, and it makes weeping sounds, as though it’s devoured a clutch of unhappy kittens.  

Over the course of this paragraph alone, Tchaikovsky shows us how pat paradigms break down in the face of wild truth. The narrator begins by trying to fit the organism into the neat category “elephant,” but as he acknowledges the surreal facts of its anatomy, this analogical assertion disappears. At the end, the narrator seems to admit defeat, noting only the thing’s basic appearance (a “pale mouldy green”) and resorting to the immediately absurd simile about kitten wails. A familiar, simple category just isn’t enough to contain the reality of the narrator’s encounter. 

This paragraph, I think, is a synecdoche for the relationship between truth and totalitarianism, at least according to Alien Clay. Truth, in its fulness, is wild and chimerical. It resists easy interpretation. It resists simple paradigms. When humans, as individuals and as groups, are confronted with wild truth, we have two choices: we observe, we record data, and we revise our prior theories. Or we stick to our suppositions and do violence to the truth and, inevitably, to each other.  

Why is science fiction so curious about totalitarianism? Because, as a humanistic mode dealing with the extreme and the exotic, it reckons with people’s deepest reactions to the “infinity of fulness” of wild truth. If we meet the truth, we become free—free to believe, free to act, free to grow. 

If we reject the truth, we become totalitarians. 

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