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angus_murchie 's review for:
In Ascension
by Martin MacInnes
The most annoying thing (of the many, many hugely annoying things) about this book is that in many places, especially the first 65 - 80 pages it’s a very easy read and it seems to have an interesting premise. Sadly from there it deteriorates badly and at points becomes unreadable twaddle. There’s really no plot worthy of the name, minimal research would appear to have been done about diving or astronaut training and I would definitely have DNF’ed it very early on if it hadn’t been a Book Club selection. I held out a vague hope that at some point all the endless inner monologue and tiresome pseudo psychoanalysis would give a decent pay off - but it really doesn’t. The childhood trauma of a physically abusive father and largely emotionally detached mother, plus how one should behave when said mother has degenerating mental faculties, might as well be in a completely different book - and it could take with it all the dull flashbacks thereby shortening the book by about a third - which would be a mercy to everyone.
In addition to childhood physical abuse and how to care for aging parents a number of other themes are raised, but only examined in the most superficial of ways - e.g. climate change, industrial damage to natural lifecycles, eco terrorism, corporate power, shell companies, conspiracy theorists.
Nothing is explained - basically it seems to be a very long and utterly tedious way of saying there’s an endless circle of life, and “life on earth came from life on earth” through some bizarre temporal distortion and a magical gain in the understanding of propulsion systems. This is doubly annoying since Leigh herself says that the theory of panspermia doesn’t remotely explain how life began at all - it merely moves the location for where it began. Attempting to answer that question with an inexplicable time-shifting circular argument is certainly no better.
Save your money and time and do not buy or read this utter dross. By the end I absolutely hated it and was actually hoping the main characters would all die.
Below are various notes I made for the Book Club discussion detailing my steadily increasing frustration with this self-indulgent rubbish. I have absolutely no idea what all the people who like this book see in it. If this is really the author’s best book, as the blurb insists, I never want to read anything else he has done.
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Psychobabble bollocks
pp80-84 Dive boat would NOT have been left unattended. It would drift.
Confusing over how they returned to Endeavour. Were they on the Zodiac? Must have been. They can’t possibly have swum all the way back to it. Obviously Leigh is confused in her description.
Lots of annoying flowery prose creeping in, plus a certain showing off with the language - hadal, mutability, exuviae, N95 (respirator masks), ontogeny, pellucid, phatic, lacunae, glioma, antic (meaning grotesque or bizarre) etc.
Hadal is 6,000m depth, not 9,000m.
Twilight is 200 to 1,000m. There is no border between them - they are separated by at least 5,000m and two other zones - midnight and abyssal. Also it’s sunlit, not sunlight zone.
When circuits short out they are dead, they don’t come back. Magnetism alone doesn’t short out circuits - would have to be a very big EMP.
p104 When you reach the point Scintilla might be crushed you bring it back up, collect the samples and send it down again. You do NOT risk losing everything you’ve already achieved. Stupid.
Stop over analysing every damn thing!
p205 Arty farty bollocks description of parabolic antennae. Get over yourself.
Utterly fails to realise that a “Cassegrain” antenna simply refers to its shape - you can also get “offset Gregorian” ones (18 years in satellite earth station building taught me this).
Why go to the observatory and get heat stroke? How do you then swim hard with heat stroke?
Don’t buy the psychoanalysis of the other astronauts at all. Also it’s tediously dull.
“A bloated latitude” for a prolonged silence is meaningless twaddle.
pp309-310 Absolute gibberish. Is the author on drugs?
Food supplies running short, but they don’t know why and the point is never revisited.
Given the algae supply for their food is absolutely crucial to the success of the mission the other two astronauts would be trained on that long, long before they began their mission, not during it.
No proper examination as to whether the algae actually supplies all their nutritional needs as humans. Highly unlikely that a single food substance could actually do that.
The original mission spec said the algae would be grown be in a sealed off compartment. That never made any sense and clearly it isn’t sealed off, as they have to tend them on a daily basis.
No explanation as to why the algae apparently starts to affect the astronauts’ physiology, just as there was no explanation earlier as to why the divers felt a compulsion to dive again, or why migrating animals are changing their behaviour and how the magic new propulsion system could possibly be causing that to happen. All these potentially tantalising points raised and then never even remotely examined again.
When it comes to the repeated discussions on life forms and their growth and evolution it feels like the author, having previously known absolutely nothing about the subject, then did a 101 course on biochemistry, gained a little bit of knowledge on the subject which absolutely blew his mind and he then felt a need to write gushing prose about it. The biochemistry of life IS indeed amazing and, in many ways, quite mysterious and awe inspiring - but sadly the author’s writing about it definitely is not.
Food doesn’t “drop through you” in gravity. Your internal muscles work it through. The author’s knowledge of space travel realities and astronaut training betrays a complete lack of fundamental research.
No way to measure time? She has a fucking diver’s watch.
—————————————————————————-
In addition to childhood physical abuse and how to care for aging parents a number of other themes are raised, but only examined in the most superficial of ways - e.g. climate change, industrial damage to natural lifecycles, eco terrorism, corporate power, shell companies, conspiracy theorists.
Nothing is explained - basically it seems to be a very long and utterly tedious way of saying there’s an endless circle of life, and “life on earth came from life on earth” through some bizarre temporal distortion and a magical gain in the understanding of propulsion systems. This is doubly annoying since Leigh herself says that the theory of panspermia doesn’t remotely explain how life began at all - it merely moves the location for where it began. Attempting to answer that question with an inexplicable time-shifting circular argument is certainly no better.
Save your money and time and do not buy or read this utter dross. By the end I absolutely hated it and was actually hoping the main characters would all die.
Below are various notes I made for the Book Club discussion detailing my steadily increasing frustration with this self-indulgent rubbish. I have absolutely no idea what all the people who like this book see in it. If this is really the author’s best book, as the blurb insists, I never want to read anything else he has done.
——————————————————————————
Psychobabble bollocks
pp80-84 Dive boat would NOT have been left unattended. It would drift.
Confusing over how they returned to Endeavour. Were they on the Zodiac? Must have been. They can’t possibly have swum all the way back to it. Obviously Leigh is confused in her description.
Lots of annoying flowery prose creeping in, plus a certain showing off with the language - hadal, mutability, exuviae, N95 (respirator masks), ontogeny, pellucid, phatic, lacunae, glioma, antic (meaning grotesque or bizarre) etc.
Hadal is 6,000m depth, not 9,000m.
Twilight is 200 to 1,000m. There is no border between them - they are separated by at least 5,000m and two other zones - midnight and abyssal. Also it’s sunlit, not sunlight zone.
When circuits short out they are dead, they don’t come back. Magnetism alone doesn’t short out circuits - would have to be a very big EMP.
p104 When you reach the point Scintilla might be crushed you bring it back up, collect the samples and send it down again. You do NOT risk losing everything you’ve already achieved. Stupid.
Stop over analysing every damn thing!
p205 Arty farty bollocks description of parabolic antennae. Get over yourself.
Utterly fails to realise that a “Cassegrain” antenna simply refers to its shape - you can also get “offset Gregorian” ones (18 years in satellite earth station building taught me this).
Why go to the observatory and get heat stroke? How do you then swim hard with heat stroke?
Don’t buy the psychoanalysis of the other astronauts at all. Also it’s tediously dull.
“A bloated latitude” for a prolonged silence is meaningless twaddle.
pp309-310 Absolute gibberish. Is the author on drugs?
Food supplies running short, but they don’t know why and the point is never revisited.
Given the algae supply for their food is absolutely crucial to the success of the mission the other two astronauts would be trained on that long, long before they began their mission, not during it.
No proper examination as to whether the algae actually supplies all their nutritional needs as humans. Highly unlikely that a single food substance could actually do that.
The original mission spec said the algae would be grown be in a sealed off compartment. That never made any sense and clearly it isn’t sealed off, as they have to tend them on a daily basis.
No explanation as to why the algae apparently starts to affect the astronauts’ physiology, just as there was no explanation earlier as to why the divers felt a compulsion to dive again, or why migrating animals are changing their behaviour and how the magic new propulsion system could possibly be causing that to happen. All these potentially tantalising points raised and then never even remotely examined again.
When it comes to the repeated discussions on life forms and their growth and evolution it feels like the author, having previously known absolutely nothing about the subject, then did a 101 course on biochemistry, gained a little bit of knowledge on the subject which absolutely blew his mind and he then felt a need to write gushing prose about it. The biochemistry of life IS indeed amazing and, in many ways, quite mysterious and awe inspiring - but sadly the author’s writing about it definitely is not.
Food doesn’t “drop through you” in gravity. Your internal muscles work it through. The author’s knowledge of space travel realities and astronaut training betrays a complete lack of fundamental research.
No way to measure time? She has a fucking diver’s watch.
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