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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Should we question science?

I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lot of respect for Sabine. She has written two excellent books and has been helpful to me with a number of physics queries - she also had a really interesting blog, and has now become particularly successful with her science videos. This is where I'm afraid she lost me as audience, as I find video a very unsatisfactory medium to take in information - but I know it has mass appeal. This meant I was concerned by Simon's tweet (or whatever we are supposed to call posts on X) saying 'The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder: if you are a fan of SH... then this is worth watching.' He was referencing a video from 'Professor Dave Explains' - I'm not familiar with Professor Dave (aka Dave Farina, who apparently isn't a professor, which is perhaps a bit unfortunate for someone calling out fakes), but his videos are popular and he...

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...