Skip to main content

Plato's Labyrinth (SF) - Michael Carroll ***

This is an interesting contribution to Springer's innovative 'Science and Fiction' series, which includes both SF novels and non-fiction books about science and science fiction. It is Michael Carroll's fourth contribution to the series that I've read, preceded by On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea, Europa's Lost Expedition and Lords of the Ice Moons. As with its predecessors, there is an interesting 'now the science part' at the end, covering wide ranging topics - in this case from quantum physics to palaeontology.

Carroll has improved on the previous book - each novel seems to step up a notch from the last. By far the biggest advantage this title has is in moving the setting to Earth - Carroll's writing works better here than in hypothetical outer planet moonscapes. In fact, the first part of the book works so well I was entirely ready to give it four or five stars, but there were a couple of issues as I continued to read that dragged it back down. 

At the heart of Plato's Labyrinth is time travel. We witness the first, tentative trips into the past and the battle between two rival groups developing the technology (one team decidedly shady). I absolutely loved the way that Carroll tied in an early trip to the work of the Victorian artist and sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the man behind the Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures in London and a set of sadly wrecked equivalents in New York. If Carroll had remained focused on this strand of the plot Plato's Labyrinth could have been a superb novel (though it would have needed a different title).

Where things go a little astray is the sheer number of other plot elements that get piled in. So we've also got a quantum theory many worlds interpretation twist to the tale, a significant Ancient Greek Minoan strand, a pantomime villain who want to import Roman legionnaires to the present day in order to... well, I'm not really sure why. Throw in the mental disintegration of one character, a love story and an incompetent comedy private eye and there's just far too much going on - reflected in the fact that the book feels very long at 367 pages. It loses impetus about half way through.

Inevitably with fictional time travel technology close scrutiny uncovers issues. So, for instance, for no obvious reason, all non-living matter transported through time starts to disintegrate on arrival. Except the devices they use to recall the time machines don't disintegrate. On the plus side, Carroll has great fun devising a living organic equivalent of a camera. He also uses Ron Mallett's real life concept of a frame dragging spiral of light as the time travel mechanism - a neat touch, though in reality even if Mallett's idea works (many physicists doubt it), it couldn't deliver the results described here. However, it's a better-than-usual attempt at suspension of disbelief on the mechanisms of time travel.

I enjoyed reading this book, but an editor with experience of fiction should have ensured that Carroll focused more, pruning those messy plot lines and producing the outstanding novel that was promised by the opening chapters. Even so, definitely Carroll's best.

Paperback: 
Bookshop.org

  

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more