Exodus (SF) - Alex Lamb ***

Exodus is full throttle, rip-roaring space opera, with a side helping of virtual reality and biotech. It strongly brings to mind two classics of the genre. The first is Star Trek's Borg episodes. As is the case with the Borg, the humans here face up to the conquering Photurians - who seek to assimilate whole species into their strange mix of hive mind and individuality. The tech behind the invaders may be at the biological cellular level rather than cyborg, but the effect is equally terrifying. I can't help but feel that this was a conscious influence, given the Borg's catchphrase, as at one point one of Alex Lamb's characters says: 'I mean resistance is worth it. The opposite of futile.'

Then there is E. E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series. Though obscure now, in its time, the Lensman series was one of the founding sagas of space opera. Thankfully, Lamb writes a lot better than Smith does - frankly, his style was distinctly clunky - but if you know the classics, it's hard not to see similarities in the vast flotillas of spaceships, devastating futuristic weapons and some of the main characters becoming superhuman thanks to highly advanced alien technology.

Although Exodus, without doubt, fits into the space opera genre, I ought to stress that this is no simplistic shoot-ups in space storyline. Like the second version of the TV show Battlestar Galactica, this book manages to transcend its roots - here with a complex mix of storylines and some remarkable imagination. This is particularly true in the 'Willworld' segments. Lamb really stretches the possibilities of combining virtual reality and biological modification and manages a complex scenario without the reader ever becoming lost in it.

This is a book I enjoyed reading... but didn't really make me want to go back for more. There are a few issues I had with it that were probably more about what I like to read than the book itself. Each chapter is split into around five different points of view, which I've never been fond of in a novel - and for me, at around 600 pages, it's too long - it could have been trimmed 100 pages at least without losing anything, tightening the whole thing up. For various reasons I found it difficult to empathise with many of the characters. But if you like a complex space opera with lots of hi-tech imaginings and a tangled, multi-point-of-view plot, this could well be a delight.

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