Skip to main content

Waking Hell (SF) - Al Robertson ****

In his sequel to Crashing Heaven, Al Robertson manages both to do the expected and to surprise us.

 Let's get the surprise out of the way first. Having established a very strong pair of central characters in his first 'Station' novel - Jack Forster and the malevolent but somehow likeable puppet-like virtual entity Hugo Fist - the natural thing to do would be to give us another Forster/Fist story. I was a little sad to start with that he didn't - in fact our previous main characters are sidelined to a couple of mentions (Fist, it seems, is now a chat show host) and instead we have a new central character, Leila to get to know. She's going to have to save the world. Which is something of a challenge, given that she's dead.

 There's no doubt that Robertson likes to set himself serious challenges as a writer. Because Leila is a digital, computer-based entity, made up of memories and the 'weave' (internet) remnants of the person after death, she can't actually be somewhere. Whenever she takes part in a scene, the only way she can see, for example, is either through surveillance cameras or through someone else's eyes if they are suitably digitally equipped. It says something for Robertson's meticulous style that he gets away with this and Leila comes across as a person without slipping up too much on the practicalities of her interacting with her environment.

 As in the first novel, we have a society on a space station orbiting a ruined Earth where there is a huge interplay between the real world and virtual reality, up to and including a pantheon of gods which are actually digital corporations. But now, Robertson has the chance to fill in some of the past, as well as giving us a fast-paced thriller where the survival of the human race is at stake (again). There are some genuine surprises here and plenty of clever extensions of the whole digital universe metaphor.

 As with the previous book, I would say that strictly this is mythology rather than science fiction, because the real-life metaphor in the virtual world is too strong to ever reflect reality. (For example, when a computer virus is produced, it appears in the form of a glowing green test tube.) There are a good range of secondary characters - I particularly liked The Caretaker (though I did guess his true nature earlier than I think the author intended) and the virtual entity Cassiel, who really grows through the book. Perhaps the only issue here was Leila's brother Dieter, who, partly due to the circumstances we find him, in proves a frustratingly vague contributor until the last minute.

 As with the previous title, Robertson gives us lots to think about around the way virtual reality and life could become more and more enmeshed - and what that implies for society. There's also a lot about the nature of personality and memory. So we get a good mix of thought-provoking concepts and a page-turning thriller. The only reason the book doesn't have five stars is I felt the parts set on the Earth and the ending felt a little rushed and didn't work quite as well as the rest. But that doesn't stop Waking Hell being, overall, one of the best contributions to truly original SF of the last decade.
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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more