Finished reading "Alien Clay" by Adrian Tchaikovsky I found the world building novel and the commentary around the fear of isolation and the safety of orthodoxy. I would skip this read. If the author intended the protagonist be a self-indulgent "thinker" obsessed with the value of a human in reaction to being an outsider on the run for a year. It felt more like blather. When contention entered the plot, we unfortunately glossed over the character development and continued to repeat the themes.