Saturation Point
I’m not quite sure what I really think of this short story. At the same time, its quite compelling, the setting, as in most of Tchaikovsky’s books is really well done, but the story itself almost feels like it wasn’t quite done yet.
The setting is in the near far future, where there was a disease much like covid which confined most of humanity to themselves. The early portion of the book is clearly written in the early days of the pandemic when folks were working via video chat and stuff. The world also is suffering from crazy climate change, where much of the tropics is now uninhabitable, not necessarily because of desertification, but actually because its too hot and the jungles and whatnot have turned that area of the world into a point where the wet bulb temperature is too high for humans to survive for long without survival suits.
The protagonist is enlisted to return to the zone where she was once part of a research team, and the adventure quickly turns into a mess with the expedition losing half of their team. They then lose even more of the team and are stuck trying to fend for their lives from both the environment and the local fauna….and that’s when the story kind of derails. I’m not sure why Tchaikovsky wanted to switch the story over to that of a more action oriented story, but the switch is a bit jarring and there’s a lot of deus ex machina’ing going on. This is where I feel that the short story format is too limiting for him.
The other reason I feel that this book doesn’t work as well is because Alien Clay covers a LOT of the content that he wanted to, I felt.
As it is, its an ok book, certainly not one of Tchaikovskys best, but still interesting if only to read about humans, especially scientists, encountering interesting situations.
Read only if you’re out of other books, or if you’re like me, a bit of a Tchaiovsky fanboy.