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

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