Skip to main content

Lords of the Ice Moons (SF) - Michael Carroll ***

This is the third of Michael Carroll's novels I've read from the 'Science and Fiction' series (the others were On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea and Europa's Lost Expedition), and it's undoubtedly the best of the three.

Like the other books in the wider series, there's some interesting 'science behind the story' at the end, particularly on generating electricity from bacteria, but that's just a nice-to-have. It's still a novel, so wins or loses on the quality of the fiction. There are some provisos, but the good news is that this is an interestingly meaty and complex story with action taking place in the atmosphere of Venus, on Earth and primarily on Saturn's moon Enceladus (Carroll loves a good gas planet moon).

An asteroid collision has left Earth's civilisation teetering on the brink and in dire need of new energy sources as both solar and wind collapse in the after-effects of the impact. Engineer Gwen Baré, who lived briefly on Enceladus as a child and has terrible memories of the place, has to return to the icy moon to try to recover fusion and bacterial generators - but a failure on the ship taking her out there is only the start of the complications she must deal with.

Carroll makes use of a few short flashback chapters to fill in background, along with a precursory story of the Victorian Princess Royal meeting Joseph Merrick (the Elephant Man), for reasons that do eventually become clear, though it's initially puzzling. Not only does Carroll explore future energy requirements (and the importance of energy to our civilisation), but encourages us to challenge assumptions when Gwen unexpectedly encounters genetically modified intelligent organisms.

So far, so good. The spanner in the works, is that this book appears to have had very little editorial input. There are some issues that an editor should have challenged, including a (female) deus ex machina, unconvincing timescales for technological development and writing that cries out for a polish. The latter is particularly obvious in the opening section, where it's difficult to get engaged with the characters. Everything moves up a satisfactory notch once Gwen gets to Enceladus, but there is still ample scope for editing.

As an example, at one point Gwen's token of a companion (he contributes very little apart from comedy Italiian-speaking-English-badly) is observing an important character he hasn't seen before. We should be seeing this person through his eyes. But we read 'Parenthetical creases bracketed her mouth, as if everything she was about to say would begin with in other words.' I'm sorry, no one has ever looked at someone else and thought that - this is a classic example where an editor's red pen should have been wielded.

I could be wrong about the lack of editorial input, but the fact that on page 25 we read 'Her disciplined military face began to soften with enthusiasm.' then two sentences later '... she said, her disciplined military face softening with enthusiasm.' suggests to me that editing has been sparse. Some typos always slip through, but that's a pretty big slip.

If it weren't for the editing issues I'd give this four stars - it's not the author's fault, but the publisher's, I'm afraid. But it's a book that remains worth reading for its ideas, even if the final execution is not all that it could have been.
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

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more