From Distant Stars (SF) - Sam Peters ****

What we have here is a satisfying detective thriller with lashings of juicy conspiracy theory, all set in a future colony where a selection of humans had been dumped many decades before by mysterious alien invaders. Although it is a sequel to Sam Peters' From Darkest Skies, there was no problem coming to From Distant Stars as I did without having read the previous title - in fact there's enough back story here that it might seem overdone if you come to this second.

The great thing about this book is that there are big underlying themes and the reader is presented with a real mystery about what is going on, as to begin with problems and onslaughts pile into the team of detectives. The hospital became a regular location, given the pounding some characters take. Peters makes good use of the tech, which via a built-in 'servant' provides a kind of super Siri service that feeds information to lenses in the eyes, so quite often a character can be talking to someone and simultaneously receiving a second feed of information.

The only downside to this is that during complex scenes, particularly the three or four all-out battles, it gets very difficult to follow the flow of where information is coming from and who is doing what to whom. It was a combination of this confusion and the fact that I guessed the main twist in the ending about halfway through what is a quite lengthy book that prevented me from giving From Distant Stars a five star rating. (It's a very minor moan, but it was also amusing that the cover proclaims 'His wife died. Her digital copy has been erased. So who is using her name?' But I can't recall anywhere in the plot that features someone using his wife's name.)

As Peters gets into top gear in the last fifty pages or so it becomes a true un-put-downable page turner, and though there are clear hooks being set up for a sequel, the ending (unlike some series books) is satisfying enough to make this feel like a good stand-alone read. There's no sense of being let down at the end.

All in all, Peters had made an impressive contribution to the thriving 'detectives in space' sub genre, and I look forward to more.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

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 ...

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...

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...

Search This Blog