Alien Clay Quotes

“Just because the tyrant dresses like a clown doesn’t mean he’s funny.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Because the hardest thing about sacrifice is not knowing if it’ll be worth it. What’s the point in taking the bullet if the person behind you in the charge loses heart, dithers, runs away? You may as well have stayed at home. You only have one life after all. It can be very hard to know when to throw it away.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Human history is full of social conventions designed to salve the consciences of the mighty and curb the ambitions of the small.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Sometimes you go through your whole life not rocking the boat and they throw you over the side anyway.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you’re even wielding it.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“You ever think about the fundamental paradox of our society? How they build a tight-knit machine of a state by breaking everyone down into solitary units turned against each other? How you compel mass obedience out of the most individualistic drives of selfishness, greed and fear?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“And that's us. No demagogues having to harangue the crowd, no self-interested cult leader talking everyone into servitude. Just a group acting together for everyone's best benefit. Even mine.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Every revolutionary group I ever knew spent far longer clutching for how to describe what they were than talking about what they were going to do.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“They want very specific answers from science. Black and white answers to complex questions. Everything sorted into predetermined boxes.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Ants and neurons are democracies, that old political saw the Mandate works so hard to discredit. You have different groundswells of popular opinion gathering momentum, and picking up new adherents like a snowball, until one urge or impulse reaches a critical mass, after which the whole—the nest, the brain—adopts that tabled motion wholeheartedly. And here’s where the hive aspect comes in, because those elements which were rooting for the alternatives give in with good grace and wave flags for the winner. There’s no holdout of political grousers claiming someone else won the election. The whole institution acts in unison the moment that threshold is crossed. And that’s us. No demagogues having to harangue the crowd, no self-interested cult leader talking everyone into servitude. Just a group acting together, for everyone’s best benefit.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“And then the guards in their heavy suits are there, caught in that weird Schrödinger’s Thug situation, where they want to drag me about as painfully as they can while simultaneously not aggravating my condition to the extent it will lessen the impact of all the rest of the pain they have planned for me later.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Madness and sanity are judged by majority norms.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“But you’ve got to care about truth, haven’t you? I won’t say that the speeches didn’t move me, but it was the intellectual dishonesty of the whole orthodox thing that galled me into action. Science, as a creed, should care about truth. It shouldn’t be bent for political aims. You shouldn’t say there’s a Wild Man of Kiln when there’s clearly nothing of humanity about the place. And on such hills I die. That doubtless sounds stupid, to you who tell yourself you will take up arms when they starve your children, when they rob you of your goods, when they come for that demographic which includes you. But it’s deviation from truth that lets them do these things. It’s the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won’t lift a finger, because they’ve believed the lies spread about you. It is the lies that starve your children because you believe the stories about general shortages, even though the grandees of the Mandate feast off gold plates every day of the year. And it is lies about science which cut most deeply, telling you that this or that group of people are naturally inferior, or another group has an innate ability to lead.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“The base unit of life is all life.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“You look at the death they sentenced you to, and squint until you can pretend it’s living.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“There's a thing on Earth, a marine isopod, that eats the tongues of fish and then replaces them so it can keep on stealing the fish's food. But to do so, it has to be a fish tongue as its second job. It's good enough at it that the fish goes on living, and maybe, because the new independent tongue has a load of little scrabbly arms, it's actually better than the old one.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“LIBERTÉ”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“They have full protective gear on, masks included, and gas grenades in case they need to put down a general riot. But most of all, they spark fear. That’s how they get you. How a small group of uniformed stormtroopers can always face down a turbulent crowd. Fear of their weapons, of their discipline, of the brutal force they can mete out.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Any oppressive system needs an element of arbitrary punishment just to keep people properly on their toes.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“If you program your computers to expect wrongdoing, then they’ll most certainly find”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“But then the Mandate was all about those neat boxes, those false binaries. Orthodox and unorthodox; his and hers; us and them.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Cognitive dissonance, yes. It’s not enough to be able to do a thing. People, human people, want to be able to believe it’s right to do so. The first thing those in authority do, after they’ve used main force and brutality to take over, is paper over everything with reasons why they were right to do it. Both because it helps you keep people in line if you can get them to believe it, and because it makes it easier to enjoy the spoils of your brutality if you convince yourself you’ve earned it. Human history is full of social conventions designed to salve the consciences of the mighty and curb the ambitions of the small. There’s something in the way humans are wired that means we want to be right by some external measure. So we invent philosophies to tell us we were right to do what we did and we’re allowed to do what we want. You find a god, basically, who tells you you’re okay.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“The Mandate is very into polar binaries, it’s in all their rhetoric. “What?” they’d say. “You don’t want this unpleasant circumstance we’re forcing on you? Then you’re obviously in favour of this absurdly exaggerated opposite we’ve just invented.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“the hardest thing about sacrifice is not knowing if it’ll be worth it. What’s the point in taking the bullet if the person behind you in the charge loses heart, dithers, runs away? You may as well have stayed at home. You only have one life after all. It can be very hard to know when to throw it away.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“A people without hope, what will they do? One of two things: nothing, or everything.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“That doubtless sounds stupid, to you who tell yourself you will take up arms when they starve your children, when they rob you of your goods, when they come for that demographic which includes you. But it’s deviation from truth that lets them do these things. It’s the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won’t lift a finger, because they’ve believed the lies spread about you. It is the lies that starve your children because you believe the stories about general shortages, even though the grandees of the Mandate feast off gold plates every day of the year. And it is lies about science which cut most deeply,”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Someone once said, probably, that exploring an alien planet was terribly intrepid, bold and glamorous, and that someone can sod off, frankly. Because, once you have a full-on space industry and alien planets you can physically go to, you find it’s actually quite inconvenient to do so. The business of physically exploring them becomes devolved to your society’s equivalent of the unpaid office intern. Someone who won’t be missed, and whose sudden demise won’t much impede the mission.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Mostly it’s human sweat and toil, though. This sort of thing is hard to properly automate, while humans are good at adjusting and adapting on the job. That’s part of it. More than that, though, it’s expensive to automate, and would require a highly trained crew of valuable technicians and operators running your fleet of shiny machines. Because once you invest in automation, you have to take care of your junk. With labourer-class people, not so much. It’s cheaper to have a half-assed crew of expendables that you know you’re never going to have to return in good condition or risk losing your deposit. Earth has a lot of surplus people”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“alien” is only ever a transient state,”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“I look up and see the stars.

Well, no. It's daytime. But I see pinpoints of day in irregular patterns across the curved upper surface of what must be a ridiculously tall chamber. Definite patterns, and there's no way I can talk myself out of seeing it as anything other than a map. A star map...The ancient cultures of Earth have imbued the stars with significance since prehistory. Why wouldn't you? They're your calendar and your clock, the universe's own way of measuring the year for you. I stand there in the dark, and for a moment I can forget the dire peril we're in because a wave of wonder washes over me. The thought that maybe this is a constant of intelligence, anywhere you can see the sky and have eyes to do it with. Does all life of sufficient complexity look up after sunset and wonder at the lights and what they mean?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay