Clarissa (SF) - Karl Drinkwater ***

Having a series of books is nothing new in science fiction, but Karl Drinkwater is taking the interesting line of having a main series of novels accompanied by a set of novellas that fill in history or generally expand the picture outside the main line of the series. In this third 'Lost Tales of Solace' book we get a key piece of the backstory.

The main Lost Solace line features military renegade Opal, accompanied by a ship with a powerful AI as she searches for her sister, Clarissa. In this novella we discover how Clarissa became lost when the space liner Solace suffered a catastrophic interaction with a strange phenomenon in this fictional universe's equivalent of hyperspace.

In many ways this should be the most important of these supporting novellas so far, but for me it was the weakest. There are number of reasons. Clarissa is ten, and reading a first person account from the viewpoint of a ten-year-old is more than a little wearing. That strange phenomenon the ship encounters is fascinating, but its abilities feel closer to fantasy than science fiction. And the whole thing comes to a rather abrupt ending leaving events entirely in the air. There is also, as Drinkwater admits, no real AI element here, which has always been one of the biggest strengths of his writing.

I think Drinkwater's way of structuring the combinations that make up the series is really interesting, and I have enjoyed the novellas, but I am getting a bit lost at this stage. What is happening here is a bit like being given pieces of a jigsaw. Each book gives us another piece of the picture - and that's great. But unlike a jigsaw, you don't have the other pieces in front of you. It's now nearly four years since I read the first novel and it's getting quite hard to keep track of all the components. We need some clever take on a recap to pull everything together again.

I've not given up on this series by any means (in fact I'm already reading the next novella), but I think the reader needs a touch more handholding for the future.

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

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...

Search This Blog