The Naturalist (SF) - Andrew Mayne ****

There's a twilight border of science fiction, sometimes known as lab lit. It features science/scientists, but the science is more current than speculative - and one aspect of The Naturalist falls into this category. Its protagonist, Professor Theo Cray, is a computational biologist, who gets sucked into a murder enquiry and uses the tools of his trade to crack the case.

You could argue that Dan Brown's Robert Langdon books fit in the same category, but unfortunately Brown gets so much of the science so horribly wrong that it would be an insult to link it with science fiction. That apart, there is one other good reason for mentioning Brown - his writing isn't exactly high quality, but he knows how to produce a book you can't put down, and Andrew Mayne uses similar page turning techniques (including very short chapters) to keep the reader wanting more. Thankfully, though, he does this with a better writing style than Brown.

With a clever twist at the beginning we're plunged into Theo Cray's world. Mayne emphasises this by writing in the first person present, a style that can be a little wearing on the reader, but certainly keeps the energy flowing.

This is primarily a crime-solving thriller, but it does have that scientific edge, and though Cray's computer system (I've only just noticed: Cray - computer system - coincidence?) is a bit too clever, the use of science here is a lot better than in Brown's books. That science part is also not just a backdrop, but essential to Cray's crime-solving efforts, from the use of plant species interaction to discover recent soil disturbance to the computerised mapping of incidents to predict other possible locations.

It's a great page-turning adventure - ideal for a spot of brainless entertainment that doesn't leave you feeling as guilty as reading Brown - but it does stretch credibility a number of times. The way that Cray effectively abandons his career to pursue a problem that puts his life at risk seems an unlikely fit with his personality. At one point he makes a totally illogical deduction based solely on the way someone looks in an old photograph. And the ending, though dramatic, is the sort of thing that Hollywood gets away with, but seems highly unlikely in a book. We are also faced with a repeatedly incompetent police force, which I hope doesn't reflect reality in America, and Cray constantly ignores opportunities to work with the police or to bring in the FBI.

However, as long as you accept a hearty suspension of disbelief and go along with the flow, the action/adventure is impressive, the bad guy is suitably horrifying, and the use of science does contribute to the action. I'm glad to have come across Professor Cray.

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, ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

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