Dark Eden

"Dark Eden was the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2012. It’s one of those books which has genuinely been a great inspiration to me. I suspect I would not have written Children of Time – or any number of post-tech alien world books, like the Expert System books and Elder Race – if I hadn’t read Dark Eden . So I owe Chris and this book a great debt. It’s one of a trilogy. The trilogy as a whole is very good, and for that matter, I think all of Chris’s writing is very good – and I think I’ve read most of what he’s written. Dark Eden is actually – and this is something that Chris does quite a bit – a follow-up to a longish short story he wrote, which you do not in any way need to have read. In fact, I think it works better if you haven’t, and then you come to the short story afterwards. The setup is that there was a crashed ship on an alien planet, and a very small number of survivors. There were five, and then three of them went off to try and get back to the orbital ship: so there are two, a man and a woman. And because the people who went off just never come back – and we do find out that they’re absolutely not going to come back – nature takes its course…. Some generations later, you have a community of people with a number of congenital birth defects, because you’ve got genetic problems when you’re all descended from the same two people, living in one location on this not terribly hospitable world. It’s very cold, and it’s dark, because it is a world without a star. It’s geologically active, and you get hints that actually there is an incredible wealth of life on this world, mostly underground, in conditions that humans couldn’t survive. The humans are interacting with the extremophile fringes of this world’s ecosystem – which in itself is such a fascinating idea. And throughout the series, you get the general sense that there is a lot of stuff going on in this world that the humans never see. What we do see is really interesting. Beckett depicts life that has adapted to this very inhospitable environment. The humans have made a mythology around the events of the crash and their original parents, and very small things have become big myths – so there is, for example, one myth they tell about what is very obviously just a spat between the two parents, who didn’t really get on. And that has become like the arguments of the gods in heaven. It’s something that the original children remember, and then that has been passed down and passed down and passed down again. There are two reasons, really, why this book is astonishing. First, this idea of seeing society reinvented and constructed – and then starting to deform and buckle, because they’re running out of space in this little crater they live in. The areas between these craters are completely inhospitable, but during the book, a breakaway group of people decides: “Right, we are going to find another place. There is another crater.” We know we are going to do an odyssey across to this other place. And we see the idea of this one founding civilization fracturing into factions, and the way that control shifts towards the warmongers and the troublemakers and so forth – in a way that obviously we, in our enlightened times, couldn’t possibly imagine. So that’s the social study. And then paired to that, Chris has done an absolutely bang-up job creating this incredibly immersive alien world – and like I say, an alien world which is very obviously far more complicated than we see. We just get these little glimpses of how much more there must be underneath the surface. These two things together make a wonderful book. I’m always fascinated by the idea of post-tech colonies, and this is one of the most extreme ones, because it comes from such desperate starting conditions. The way that mythology and belief and religion can be reinvented based on small chance occurrences, and then become big social restrictions and mores… This is one of the best examples of that genre of fiction. Oh, he doesn’t do the sort of exposition stuff I do in Children of Time, to his credit! If you’ve got the background, you can see the logic behind a lot of what he’s showing. So for example, because it’s dark, there is one creature that hunts by sonar and also throws its voice – it uses echoes to confuse where it’s coming from. This is a holy terror to the humans who encounter it while they’re moving between habitable craters. This is not a predator they’re used to. Beckett is communicating what’s going on to us, the reader, without the characters getting it, because they don’t have the perspective to understand. As a reader you think, “Oh, this is the adaptation that’s going on. It makes perfect sense for that to arise in this environment.” But it’s almost something supernatural to the human characters involved, because they don’t have the context. It’s not uncommon, and it’s something I particularly love. I write it quite a bit – with things like Service Model , where the main robot character has no grasp of what’s going on most of the time, but hopefully the readers can pick up what he doesn’t. It’s not uncommon in sci fi to have a world the main point of view characters don’t understand – you get it in Jack Vance, and you especially get it in Gene Wolfe, and that kind of thing. Alien Clay is a book of mine that came out in 2024, and it’s another two-part book, really. The main impetus was that I wanted to write about a weird alien ecosystem, specifically an ecosystem where the evolution doesn’t follow traditional Darwinian lines. So in the world of Kiln, the biology is almost ridiculously symbiotic, so that each apparently individual creature is a melange of various creatures, each of which does a particular thing. You might have a creature that has good legs to walk it around, and one with a good digestive system and one with a good prey capture system, and they all Lego together to make this big monster. But you might find those same legs walking something else around elsewhere on the planet. They’re all kind of modular, and they interchange parts. This is very vexing for the human research team who are on the planet. There are a small number of staff, and then a large number of convict labourers, sent by this phenomenally unpleasant authoritarian regime called the Mandate. The Mandate believe that they are destined to run their nasty little regime because of science, and they have a slogan, which says the universe has a direction, and the direction is us. And then they find this world where the universe, the biology of the world, is patently not going in any direction they recognise, and they send their government appointed scientists, saying, “Make sense of this. Make it make sense in a way that is politically orthodox, so that we can show that the universe is basically designed to produce things that are human and earth-like, and indeed authoritarian”. The main character is a dissident scientist who’s been sent along with the labour force, and the book is really an exploration both of human divisions, and the weird indivisibility of this sort of insane alien ecosphere. Obviously there is a philosophical point there about unity and division, but there’s also just a lot of fun, weird alien stuff, because that’s what I like to write. I luck into quite a lot! I wanted to write about the weird aliens. I knew I needed a human perspective, and it occurred to me that I would do that prison camp thing, which is an idea I’ve talked about in different ways in other books. But then, rather like the things on the planet, the two ideas started to grow together and ended up benefiting from each other in ways I hadn’t particularly anticipated when I started the book. So there’s a lot of serendipity in that. I didn’t really do formal research for Alien Clay . I was very much relying on my existing stock. I’d previously delved into how authoritarian regimes work, and the human side of it, because I knew I wanted to write a book about that at some point. From the alien side, I’ve got a fairly good handle on theories of evolution – it is part of my stock-in-trade, and I’ve written a variety of other related books, most especially The Doors of Eden . So I’ve been thinking for a while about the question, how else could it work? What do you have to do not to end up fitting into the standard Darwinian competition model? Evolutionary ideas as politics caught on very quickly. During Darwin’s life, you very quickly saw people adopting the idea – “Alright, if we can’t use divine right and God to justify why we’re on top and they are not, we will make it a science thing. And Mr. Darwin has come along saying, survival of the fittest. So obviously, because we are doing better than them, we are fitter, and ergo, this is how the world is supposed to be.” People produced all manner of phenomenally racist stuff feeding off Darwinian ideas that, as is frequently the case with science, they did not particularly understand, but they were very happy to parrot to make their point. So the idea of science having to suborn itself to political ideology is absolutely a thing. It’s been used by a wide variety of campaigns and regimes to prop themselves up. There’s some weird part of human psychology whereby just having all the guns and all the physical, hard power does not seem to be enough for dictators: they’ve got to justify their position with reference to some larger mythology or higher power, whether it is religious or scientific or mythological. We need people to believe we are meant to be on top. I genuinely don’t think it’s simply that people will cause less trouble that way – I think that psychologically, dictators themselves feel the need to believe that they are in some way special and chosen and permitted to do what they do. So that’s the Mandate: it demands that the universe play by the rules that it set out, because those rules allow the Mandate to win."