Skip to main content

Ancestral Night (SF) - Elizabeth Bear *****

Only a couple of weeks ago, reviewing a 1960s SF book, I bemoaned the fact that science fiction novels of ideas are less common now. Although it is correctly labelled a space opera, Ancestral Night delivers ideas with aplomb.

Let's deal with the space opera aspect first. Elizabeth Bear provides some excellent adventure scenes in space, and we've the usual mix of huge spaceships and interesting aliens. Main character Haimey Dz is an engineer on a ship that salvages wrecks - but, as we gradually discover - she also has a forgotten past. A major feature of the storyline (one that seems to link to the medieval idea of the lost wisdom of the past) is ancient technology from a long-dead race with capabilities, notably manipulating spacetime mentally (Bear has yet to point out that the travel technologies used here could manipulate time as well as space), which fit well with Arthur C. Clarke's magic definition.

I particularly liked the (surely intentional) nods to the much-missed Iain M. Banks's 'the Culture' universe - for example the quirkily named ships, though here they are more poetic than humorous, and the AI shipminds that are characters in their own right, though Bear's are less entirely emancipated that Banks's.

When it comes to the ideas, there are two broad strands. One is physics. Although the ancient alien technology is a different matter, the conventional spaceships have Alcubierre-White drives - based on the closest thing we have from real physics to the design for a real warp drive. This is lovingly described and plays a major part in the storyline. We've also get a rather nice description of (and plotline involving) the galaxy's supermassive black hole. More significantly, though, as a novel of ideas, the book explores the nature of personal freedom within society.

This is done in part by contrasting Bear's equivalent of the Culture - the Synarche - with a group of pirates. (As an aside it's fascinating how there seem to be spontaneous emergences of themes in books - we've also seen recently Alastair Reynolds' Revenger series with pirates as a major factor.) In all honesty, the 'pirates' in Ancestral Night would probably be better labelled anarchists as their motivation is significantly more sophisticated than stealing pieces of eight. It's perhaps a reflection of the fact that characters with ambivalent morals tend to be more interesting, that I found myself lining up more with Farweather, the main antagonist, rather than with Dz.

I only have two small moans. One is the not uncommon urge for the author to tweak just one aspect of the language - in this case, Bear changes the names for time units. So, for instance, days become diars and light years (I know it's not a time unit, but it's the time part of it that changes) become light-ans. Any far-future book is, in effect, translating the language, and it just doesn't make sense to change one tiny aspect - particularly one that's used by science, so is more likely to remain consistent. It just grated a little. The other small issue is that the book is rather too long, mostly because the author's motto of 'show don't tell' is ignored and we get long internal monologues - often lasting several pages - which don't move much forward. This contrasts with the dialogues, where the political side of the ideas strand is mostly advanced, which, if anything, can be too short.

These points are small though. This is certainly the best science fiction novel I've read in 2019 so far and I look forward to see how Bear develops the characters and her impressively rich universe.
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 AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cosmological Koans - Anthony Aguirre ***

The format of this book suggests the author is trying a bit too hard to be different, which is a shame as it contains plenty of good material. At first sight, the approach of using (pseudo) 'Zen koans' as a linking theme is reminiscent of awful past titles that attempt to show parallels between Eastern philosophies and physics (think, for example, of The Tao of Physics or, even worse,  The Dancing Wu Li Masters ). But this isn't really the case - Anthony Aguirre is, rather, using the approach of presenting a short passage that makes you think (the koan) as an entry point to fifty connected essays on physics. Having said that, the theme can seem a little heavy handed. To complicate the format even further, as well as the koans, each essay fits into a journey in time and space, which in the introduction Aguirre describes as historical fiction: but sometimes this seems to be unnecessarily distorted to match the 'Zen koans' theme. So, for example, the very firs...
Post a Comment
Read more