The Caloris Network (SF) - Nick Kanas ***

As the subtitle 'a scientific novel' suggests, this is another in Springer's innovative series attempting to combine science fiction and science fact, but is sadly not one of the stronger entries in the series.

In this novella (despite that subtitle, I can't really bring myself to describe 100 pages of fiction as a novel), we join the crew on a mission to Mercury - but they haven't been told the whole truth about their mission, lives have already been lost, and what they discover there proves quite a shock - a totally alien form of life.

On the good side, we discover quite a lot about Mercury, not often written about in science fiction (perhaps, in part, because it's a touch boring). There's also a bit about astrobiology, and the possibilities of life that isn't carbon-based. Of itself, this is nothing new, but the approach taken by Nick Kanas, slightly bizarrely a psychiatrist who used to work for NASA, is relatively novel.

The biggest problem, perhaps, is this book's functioning as a novel. For a large part of the opening section we are waiting for this part of Mercury to warm up in the sunlight, and, frankly, very little happens. To counter this, Kanas resorts to a whole lot of jumping around, with assorted flashbacks, which tends to confuse more than than they succeed in keeping the story going. There is also the classic weakly-written fiction assumption that in order for a character to have an idea they have to be inspired by remembering or seeing something. Here there was a particularly painful example where the main character 'remembers' that her Alzheimer's suffering father responded to music and lights more than speech. 'So, we tried sending out a radio hailing frequency to the [alien], and it responded to us.' Huh? Not only is it a gratuitous 'I remembered X and it gave me an idea,' the resultant idea is a total non sequitur.

So it's certainly not a book I'd recommend reading for entertainment as pure science fiction - it was no page turner. However, the combination of the aspects described in the text and the additional factual information in the 'science behind the fiction' section at the back about Mercury and silicon-based life was interesting enough to make this worth a look.

As I've commented on other books in the series, the pricing, in this case £15 for a 100 page novella plus about 20 factual pages in paperback, means this is very unlikely to be justifiable as a personal purchase - the publisher points out it is accessible free to academics and students through Springer's ebook deals.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog