Skip to main content

Europa's Lost Expedition (SF) - Michael Carroll ***

I've now read a good few in this Springer series of titles that attempt to bring science fiction and science fact together. Some are straight non-fiction, but many, like this one, are science fiction with a  'science bit' at the end - and of those, this is one of the best I've come across.

 I thought I was having deja vu to start with, as one of the first in the series I read involved an ill-fated expedition to Saturn's moon Titan, while this involves... an ill-fated expedition to Jupiter's moon Europa. (At the time I didn't realise that On the Shore of Titan's Farthest Sea was even written by the same author.) Although the struggles of existence on a remote, cold moon were a bit samey, luckily the plot was sufficiently different to mean that this wasn't the end of the world.

 The reason I say this is one of the best in the series is that there is some depth to the plotting. Mysterious deaths occur on the expedition. We have a flashback to an earlier expedition that went horribly wrong. Many of the characters seem to have a dubious past in the world war that devastated Earth a few years previously. It has got far more going for it than just a 'humans versus the landscape' story. I genuinely did want to read on and find out what was going to happen, and exactly what was the meaning of these hints from the past. We had a murder mystery and more to contend with as well as the boilerplate science fiction plot.

 However, things weren't all rosy. The book was very slow to start, with a lot of exposition on the ship on the way to Europa. It didn't help the reader in getting a head around the various characters present on the journey that quite a few had surnames as first names, so even remembering what sex they were was a struggle to start with. (One (female) character's first name is Hadley - I couldn't help but wonder if it was a coincidence that the name turned up on one page adjacent to the words 'convection cell.') I said in the review of Michael Carroll's earlier book that his characters were two dimensional - these are a little better, but they still all feel like they've been allocated a role - the perky one, the brooding one, the religious one and so forth - and Carroll certainly doesn't do enough to cover his big reveal, which seemed obvious fairly early on.

 The thing that nagged at me most in the plotting was this was supposed to take place just a few years after a third world war that made the second seem like a skirmish - yet things had already got back on track enough to send a science expedition to Europa. That just didn't work for me - nor did the way everyone just kept on doing their jobs as equipment repeatedly failed and expedition members died. I'd also say it's unfortunate that a lot of the science stuff, laid on fairly heavily in the text as well as the science bit at the end, was geology based - the hardest of all topics to make interesting to the general reader.

 A step forward, though, in this brave attempt of putting together a series that educates as it entertains (and the pricing isn't as eye-watering as it once was, though ebooks are still far too expensive). It doesn't compare with good modern science fiction, feeling very 50s at best, but it is readable and some of the science bits were enlightening and interesting.

 Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more