πŸ“— Books 2025, 19: In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes

It’s unusual to get a science-fiction novel that was also longlisted for the Booker, as this was. The question, though: is it science fiction?

It certainly has science: most notably marine biology. Also space travel to the edge of the solar system via a new, unexplained drive; something which might be a first contact event; possible time travel; and a kind of ascendence. In fact there’s a section near the end that had strong resonances of 2001: A Space Odyssey for me.

So yes, it’s SF. But it feels somehow incomplete. Not unfinished, except in the way you might say that about 2001 itself. It keeps the pages turning OK, but I’m not entirely sure exactly what it’s trying to achieve, and (therefore) whether it’s successful.

It tells two stories at once. And I do wonder whether MacInnes was similarly torn between his desire to write a mainstream, literary novel, and one diving deep into fantastika.

Leigh, the marine biologist who ends up on a space mission, had a physically abusive father, which not surprisingly affects much of her life. Though her sister appears not to have suffered similarly, and there are hints that Leigh is not entirely a reliable narrator. (But then again, who is?) The adult Leigh is torn between her career and her desire to visit her mother, who is showing signs of dementia.

As a marine biologist Leigh experimentally engineers algae which is intended to feed, oxygenate, and cheer up the small crew of a year- (or more) long voyage. But there’s a lot going in the background of the story, that Leigh and most of the other characters are not privy to. Secrets kept by companies and governments. We, the readers, are also kept outside the walls of secrecy.

So it’s very good at evoking the situation of someone who is a cog β€” albeit an essential one β€” in very complex machine, but who has no picture of the machine as a whole.

All of which leaves it convincing, but frustrating, especially if you’re looking for a nicely wrapped-up story.

πŸ“— Books 2025, 18: Glory Road, by Robert A Heinlein

I had a sudden hankering to reread this old Heinlein book (even older than me, it turns out, being first published in 1963). I read it as a kid, from the library, and if I ever bought a copy it isn’t accessible now.

I searched my local library’s catalogue. No joy. But the excellent World of Books duly had an old copy or two, and one was soon here.

It is almost exactly as I remembered it, which is to say it’s a tale of derring-do, sword-and-sorcery adventure, where the sorcery is sufficiently-advanced technology. We don’t learn anything about how it works, and it doesn’t matter. It’s just a fun story, very much of its time.

The first-person male protagonist is one of those highly-capable men beloved of that era’s male American SF writers. But he is relatively lacking in self-confidence at times, which is surprisingly refreshing for the type. The female lead is mostly great, and considerably more capable than the guy, even if he doesn’t exactly realise it.

Anyway, loads of fun, and I’m glad to have read it again after all these years.

πŸ“— Books 2025, 9: The Interpreter, by Brian Aldiss

I have loads of old SF books that I’ve picked up in various second-hand shops over the years, some of which I’ve read. This year I seem to be working through a few.

I couldn’t honestly tell you whether I’ve ever actually read anything by Aldiss before. I mean, I feel like I must have, if only out of the Balloch library, many, many years ago. But offhand, I couldn’t name any.

And if this were a prime example, I don’t think I’d bother with more, sadly. It’s not a bad idea. The titular interpreter is a human on a far-future Earth that is occupied by a tripedal alien race. Their empire has developed by trade and trickery as much as by military conquest, and it seems that’s how Earth was taken.

It’s a far-flung outpost, one of four million systems in the empire, so there’s bound to be corruption. An emissary is sent from the imperial centre to investigate reports of the Earth administrator abusing its people, which he/she/it (they’re a sexually trimorphic species) is. Our far-from-heroic interpreter might just have a chance to get the truth out.

As I say, not a bad idea, just not that well told. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the writing, except for the dialogue being stilted. Oddly, it’s fine between the interpreter and the aliens β€” maybe the fact that we know he’s translating lessens the effect. But between the humans, it’s just clunky.

And the plot is just about believable. Just. Luckily it’s only 126 pages; and I did sit up to finish it last night, so I guess it’s got something.

πŸ“š Books 2024, 24: A Jura for Julia by Ken MacLeod

Short stories by Ken πŸ“š. I mentioned this in my Nineteen Eighty-Four post, since the first and last stories are inspired by Orwell’s novel. The last being the title story.

Both they, and the others, are very good. Ken’s usual concerns are here, of course: the future, politics, Scotland, and more.

Also the cover and internal illustrations are by Fangorn. Highly recommended.

πŸ“š Books 2024, 23: Death's End by Cixin Liu, Translated by Ken Liu

I laugh gently at my past self, musing that this volume, based on its title, might have a less bleak universe-view.

Reader, it does not.

In fact, that’s the thing I liked least about this whole trilogy, the dark view of the universe, of sentience. The idea that every species that develops intelligence and advances to the point of thinking about space travel and the idea of possibly communicating with other intelligent species; that they would all have a xenocidal1 instinct. Have it, and routinely, casually act on it, by wiping out the star systems of other species they detect.

I’m not saying it couldn’t be so. As one explanation for the Fermi paradox it’s exactly that: one explanation. But it’s just too fuckin bleak for my tastes.

Otherwise, this story, and the trilogy as a whole, is jam-packed with ideas, stuff about relativity, higher and lower dimensions, all sorts of good hard-SF stuff. The characters are kind of blank, undeveloped: I don’t think they’ll be sticking in my memory. But I enjoyed it overall.

Apart from when I was annoyed/disturbed/upset by the dark forest idea.

Your central idea: I do not like it.


  1. The word is Orson Scott Card’s invention, but/and it’s a good one. ↩︎

πŸ“š Books 2024, 22: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, Translated by Joel Martinsen

This is somehow much less obscure and strange than the first one. I don’t know how much that is to do with it having a different translator, but it’s possible. The third one is back to Ken Liu, who translated the first one, so maybe we’ll see.

The other odd thing is that when I added this to Micro.blog’s Bookshelves feature, it came up with a subtitle I’ve never heard of before: ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2’. On the book’s title page, and in any other discussion I’ve heard of, it’s always referred to as ‘The Three-Body Trilogy’.

Getting to the story itself: perhaps the least believable thing about the whole thing is the idea humans could be convinced to believe that an alien invasion force was on its way to Earth and would arrive in 450 years. To believe and act toward resisting the force or ameliorating the situation by escaping or anything else.

I mean, in the real world we can’t even get people to believe in, get governments and businesses to act on, the climate emergency, and its effects are visible day by day.

The climate is largely ignored in this book, as well, though in the latter part, set two hundred years after the start, we see some extreme desertification in China.

It’s pretty bleak in places, in its philosophy, this one; especially as regards the Fermi paradox, or a solution thereto. But it leaves us at a point where I’m thinking, ‘Where now? That feels like a decent ending.’

But Death’s End (great title, and potentially a much less bleak philosophy, if it matches the title) is sitting waiting, all 700+ pages of it. Why does each volume of a trilogy tend to be longer than the one before?1 So we’ll see where that takes us.

I enjoyed this. There’s a lot of telling, and the characters maybe aren’t very clearly differentiated, but it’s full of ideas.


  1. Not the ur-trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: a large part of The Return of the King was appendices, making it the shortest of the three. ↩︎

Who Do You Think You Both Are?

I suppose I should tell you what I thought of the three Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials.

They were good. Not great, but good. My favourite of the three β€” and I think probably the best, too β€” was the middle one, ‘Wild Blue Yonder’.

As to the ending, the ‘bi-generation’ thing was daft, but fun. It was good to give the leaving and arriving Doctors the chance to interact, and a Doctor ending without it being a death was good.

However, let us speak of the extension of that effect, as explained in this Radio Times article. I was directed there by @BenSouthwood, via a conversation on Micro.blog.

As I said there, I loved the idea of the Timeless Child, and the expansion it brought to The Doctor’s past and the prehistory of the Time Lords. But this ‘every Doctor is now bi-generated’ idea just seems like it leaves things in a mess.

Sure, you can explain it all away with branching timelines, alternative realities and all that. But it all just seems a bit too chaotic, you know? Even if they never use it, it feels unnecessary.

And then there’s this idea of making an expanded ‘Whoniverse’, in the vein of what Marvel and Star Wars have become. Disney’s money is going to allow this, presumably. More shows, even, than when we had Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Trouble is, from my point of view, that I’ve lost interest in both Star Wars and Marvel exactly because there’s so much stuff. It’s all just too much.

So I hope my favourite programme doesn’t go the same way. Or at least, if it does, that the original programme will always remain at the hearts of the franchise, and not depend on any of the expansion packs.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (Books 2023, 15) πŸ“š

I started reading this a few years back, and stopped after the first chapter or so, because it seemed too similar to the thing I was trying to write at the time. I didn’t want to be overly influenced, or worse, unconsciously plagiarise it.

But it’s always been in the back of my mind. And recently I’ve been trying to get back into that novel I was working on then, and finding it difficult. So I thought maybe reading the space opera I backed away from because it was too similar to my own nascent space opera would be just what I needed to get me kickstarted.

That hasn’t quite happened yet (maybe because I read it on holiday), but I loved the hell out of this.

Great characters you enjoy spending time with. A plot that’s just believable enough, with stakes that are high for the characters and then get higher. An interesting, believable galactic political background, with Earth as very much the minor player.

None of the nonhuman characters feel really alien, except from in their physical descriptions, but that’s OK.

I’d say, if you liked Firefly, you’ll like this.

Excession by Iain M Banks (Books 2022, 21)

Yes, I’m only reading Iain Banks at the moment. What of it? Or I was for a brief period up until the book after this.

Probably my favourite Culture novel, and possibly the best. Mainly because the ships are most prominent and coolest and it’s all just huge fun!

I talked about it back in 2013 god how can this have been going on for so long? Where by ‘this’ I mean The Great Banksie Reread. On the other hand, I suppose as long as I reread his books, it’ll be going on, no matter how many ’re-' prefixes we might want to apply.

There are a couple, though none of the SF, that I’ve still only read once. I think maybe literally a couple: Stonemouth and The Quarry. And one, the poetry collection (with Ken McLeod), that I’ve only partly read.

But anyway, Excession: pure dead brilliant. If by some odd means you’ve read his SF and haven’t got to this yet, you have a treat in store for you. Or if you’re just starting out. Or if you’re re-re-rereading, like me.

The Culture meet an object? Entity? Being? That they don’t understand and can’t cope with. An Outside Context Problem, as they call it. It’s excessive, so it’s an excession. Things are set in motion. (Some of them very very fast things.)

The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks (Books 2022, 19)

The last of the Culture books and Banksie’s SF books, both at all, and that I had only read once.

The odd one about this, as a Culture book, I realised only very late on, is that neither Special Circumstances nor even Contact are involved, directly. Just a random grouping of ships who take an interest in the matter.

The matter in question being the decision of a species called the Gzilt to sublime, or leave the material realm for higher dimensions. This a common endpoint (or new beginning) for civilisations in the Culture universe, and I wonder whether, had Iain lived, he would have taken us to the point where The Culture itself was making that decision.

Anyway, the sonata in question is one that is barely playable because it was written for ‘an instrument not yet invented’, which turns out to be be the Antagonistic Undecagonstring, or Elevenstring. An instrument with some 24 strings (some not counted in the name, because they are not played, they just resonate) designed to be played with two bows simultaneously.

Our hero β€” or at least, the main humanoid viewpoint character β€” Vyr Cossont, has been surgically adapted to have an extra pair of arms to allow her to play it. It is still next to impossible, but she has made it her ‘life task’: something to do while waiting for the day when your civilisation sublimes. The decision for them to go was made long before she was born.

But her playing the sonata is only a side issue. The real problem is that maybe someone is trying to sabotage the sublimation. Or maybe not, but odd things are afoot, and various people and ships get involved, and it’s all a whole shitload of fun.