Before Mars (SF) - Emma Newman *****

Perhaps the most impressive thing with a good piece of writing is when careful plotting brings together disparate pieces of information that the reader has absorbed (in this case over two previous books) to provide a lucid whole. In Before Mars, Emma Newman powerfully combines a truly engaging mystery, based on a small Mars base, with the unfolding drama that took place on Earth in the previous novel After Atlas.

While it's not essential to have read the earlier book first, it's highly recommended to do so. This gives the reader a strong sense of having an overview of what's happening in the background, where the characters don't - only to have the twist near the end of the book add satisfying complexity.

As with the previous novels, Newman perhaps works a bit too hard at making her central character someone with personal difficulties, not helped by a distinct lack in places of 'show, don't tell' with page after page of internal monologue - some of which (particularly about not relating to her daughter) contributed nothing to the plotting.

In the end, though, this doesn't matter. As it has several times before, Mars proves a great location for a tense, claustrophobic thriller - but the way this story weaves into the bigger Planetfall picture makes it far more than that.

In her first three Planetfall books - it's hard to imagine there won't be more - Newman has proved herself utterly in control of a massive story arc. I just can't wait for what comes next.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

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

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

Deep Utopia - Nick Bostrom ***

This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. If you can picture the impact of a cross between Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach and Gaileo's Two New Sciences (at least, its conversational structure), then thrown in a touch of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , and you can get a feel for what the experience of reading it is like - bewildering with the feeling that there is something deep that you can never quite extract from it. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for his book Superintelligence in which he looked at the implications of having artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond human capabilities. In a sense, Deep Utopia is a sequel, picking out one aspect of this speculation: what life would be like for us if technology had solved all our existential problems, while (in the form of superintelligence) it had also taken away much of our appare

Search This Blog