Revenger (SF) - Alastair Reynolds *****

I confess I got this rather back-to-front, reading the second novel in this series, Shadow Captain before this, the first. If anything, Revenger is slightly better than the second title, though both are excellent, and my opinion of the second book has been raised by reading this one, because it benefits from the context.

We follow the Ness sisters Arafura and Adrana into space in this far future adventure. What I didn't realise on reading the second novel, which is written from the viewpoint of Adrana, is that the first was written from the viewpoint of Arafura, and this contrasting approach really opens up some interesting aspects of what's going on and the differences between the sisters.

By far the best thing about this book is Reynolds' superb world-building. This is a very different solar system, millions of years in the future, when the planets have been long demolished producing millions of small habitats which have been repeatedly occupied and lost in a series of rises and falls of civilisation (the so-called Occupations). We see Arafura go from a rather spoiled brat sister to the older and more cynical Adrana to being a hard case who is driven to take on a piratical captain. Seeing the development of Arufura's character gives her a bit more depth than is clear in Shadow Captain, where she merely comes across as difficult, manipulative and far too young for her actions. It's interesting to wonder if the less pleasant Arafura in the second book is intended to be real or just Adrana's biassed viewpoint.

There are also elements of the back story here which help explain some aspects of Shadow Captain, notably the nature of the coinage 'quoins', which play a significant part in the latter - it might have been helpful if that revelation had been brought through to the second book.

One oddity that struck me in Shadow Captain, but even more so here, is the peculiar use of language. Given this is set millions of years in the future, we can't expect them to be speaking English - so anything we read is effectively posed as a translation. That being the case, I don't understand why just a few words are rendered in a peculiar fashion. (I'm not talking about the 'common' usage, such as 'ain't' and 'coves', which is fine as dialect.) Most notably, air is called 'lungstuff'. This seems designed to give the writing an appropriate period feel for the piratepunk atmosphere (there may not be such a word, but there ought to be), but it sits strangely and seems unnecessary.

Overall, a great story with so many interesting ideas that translates the classic shipboard adventure into the far future with great aplomb.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

Search This Blog