Skip to main content

Inscape (SF) - Louise Carey *****

I've never been a huge fan of dystopian novels or movies - life can be miserable enough without making us even more depressed - but there are exceptions, and Louise Carey's Inscape proved to be one of them. 

Broadly, SF dystopias fall into two categories - bangs and whimpers. In a bang dystopia there is a big, sudden catastrophe, often a nuclear war, a biological disaster (think The Death of Grass) or a touch of the aliens (War of the Worlds, The Day of the Triffids and many more). By contrast, whimper dystopias involve creeping change, traditionally political (1984), but ever since Pohl and Kornbluth's classic The Space Merchants, more likely to be the fault of corporates, which these days are usually a variation on the theme of today's IT giants.

Interestingly, Inscape involves both types of dystopia - so there has been an apocalyptic collapse (not entirely explained), but post-collapse it's the tech corporations that have taken over, with the central character Tanta being under the aegis of InTech - a young agent who is sent into action against the opposing corporation Thoughtfront (I kept reading this as 'Thoughtful', which probably doesn't give the right flavour). The setting gradually reveals itself to be a single, unnamed city divided by a river, which suggested a familiar location.

Carey gives us brilliantly driving action (so much so that I hardly noticed the book was written in the present tense, which I usually find jarring to read). However, there's a lot more to the book than the action. Tanta is a ward of the corporation, brought up her entire life to do their bidding. We get some really interesting psychological aspects here in the way that Tanta and her cohort have effectively been programmed for loyalty - and a striking revelation about the technology that supports this.

Tanta's near super-powered agent ends up in an odd-couple pairing with Cole, a neuroscientist/genius programmer whose memory has been partially wiped. He's over twice her age, unfit and unsuited to the danger of the fieldwork he's thrown into. This gives the storyline considerably more depth than is usually the case in a novel where the main character is only 17.

I was totally immersed in the world that Carey has created here and enjoyed every minute of it. Of course there are plenty of details familiar from other SF novels in terms of the characters having built-in comms and information technology (the 'inscape' of the title), but a combination of well-choreographed action scenes and thoughtful consideration of the impact of the mental manipulation and gradual realisation of what this means made for something more than a typical SF action adventure. I can't wait for the next book, featuring further revelations hinted at when we reach the end of Inscape.

Paperback:

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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