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

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

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, ...
Post a Comment
Read more