Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
In the opening sentences of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay , a spaceship breaks up in orbit over an alien planet, spilling stasis pods whose inhabitants are resuscitated mid-crash, waking to panic and pandemonium as they tumble uncontrollably towards the planet. Some of the resuscitations fail; some of the pods are smashed by debris; some of their chutes fail to deploy. It's a familiar scene, for all its drama; a classic opening of any number of science fiction stories that drop their protagonists into a crisis and then let them work out their survival and the rest of their story from there. But as our narrator, Professor Arton Daghdev, explains—from his vantage point in one of the descending pods, albeit one that makes it to the planet's surface more or less intact—this is not an accident, but the system operating as designed. The ship is carrying convicts to a labor camp. It has been built to survive the journey and no more. Dumping the prisoners out in space, terrifying...