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

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more