Skip to main content

Bewilderment (SF) - Richard Powers ****

Generally speaking, I avoid anything listed for the Booker Prize as being too worthy and pretentious to be bothered with, but I'd heard good things about Bewilderment, and I have found in the past that genre books that manage to get past the literati (Wolf Hall, for example) are far better than the average entry.

The publisher would probably disagree, but the reality is that Bewilderment is science fiction. I wondered to start with if Richard Powers was dealing more in Lab Lit - fiction with a scientific context but where the science isn't the driver in how people's lives are changed - but this is pretty solid SF. Clearly the book is strongly influenced by that SF classic Flowers for Algernon - in fact, Powers does a couple of open hat tips in its direction. Although Bewilderment isn't as ground-breaking as Flowers, it follows the model of a person's brain being changed by science to deal with an issue, but here it's an emotional problem rather than an intellectual one.

There is also a second level of SF content - one of the two main characters is an astrobiologist, and the very short segments of the book (you couldn't call them chapters, but they make it easy to 'just read one more') are interspersed with 'visits' to imaginary other planets 'taken' by the character with his son, Robin, who is the one who undergoes the brain treatment that seems to mystically link him to aspects of his dead mother.

The book is genuinely engaging and we feel for father and son as they struggle with the realities of life. The SF concept is interesting and the scientific detail well-handled without it getting in the way.

I only have two small issues with the book. One is that the pretentiousness required to make the shortlist creeps in a bit. The dialogue of the boy and his mother is all in italics without speech marks. This makes for poor readability and provides no benefit for the narrative - it's just showing off. And the environmental context is very heavy handed. Not only is the boy's heroine a weakly disguised Greta Thunberg, but the real threat we face in climate change is presented in the pure doom terms typical of children - acceptable in the child character, but not the supposed scientist father. It simply doesn't reflect the real science of climate change in the way that the astrobiology parts do.

Overall, an interesting and enjoyable book. I find it entertaining that it's apparently a bestseller in the 'metaphysical and visionary' category: this underestimates its value. What Powers does here is what SF does far better than conventional literary fiction - explore what it is to be human by using hypothetical developments in science and technology to imagine how human beings would react to them. Bewilderment does this very well.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more