Skip to main content

The Sanctuary (SF) - Andrew Hunter Murray *****

Part way through the first act of this explicitly three-act SF novel, I was finding things distinctly depressing. (But there's better news to come.) The first person protagonist, a portrait artist named Ben, lives in a low-key dystopian future for a country that is never explicitly identified, though is fairly obviously England. Cities are in decay, the economy seems to be pretty much non-existent and the only places that are pleasant to live in are Villages (with a capital V) - walled communities where old rich people are waited on hand on foot by the young poor.

Andrew Hunter Murray has a very cool, detached, almost period writing style - combined with the dismal setting (it's never really explained how we get from where we are now to this miserable future) made the first act difficult to engage with - but the whole feel of the book changes with the second act when the action moves to a private island - the sanctuary of the book's title. This is an apparently utopian society, constructed by the billionaire behind the Villages. Ben manages to get to the island (half-killing himself in the process) to see his fiancée who works there - he expects to hate the place, but initially he finds it beguiling.

The key characters that Ben encounters on the island are surely derived from The Tempest. The Prospero figure is John Pemberley, the billionaire who set up the island, who is even described as a magician, and is accompanied by his daughter, Bianca (the Miranda figure, who only knows life on the island). He has two main supporters - an Ariel equivalent in the scientist Angela, and Caliban represented by the security chief Munro, who only really seems to be in the book to make sure that Caliban is represented as he has very little part to play in the plot. But Ben's growing relationship with John and Bianca, combined with a well-thought through utopian environment really elevates the interest - especially as cracks start emerge and as Ben tries to uncover John's background and what is really happening on the island and how this will change the world at large.

If there is an element of The Tempest here, it is inverted - rather than the shipwrecked sailors transforming Miranda's view of the world, ultimately the book is driven by the Prospero figure's plans - and the 'brave new world' here is the island itself, not the rest of the world. We travel with Ben mentally as he unravels the darker side of the utopia and how it is shaped by John's origin story. The two big denouements at the end of the final act are reasonably well flagged up in advance, so the reader may well be able to predict the ending, though there is at least one unpredictable twist.

All in all, despite a slightly underwhelming start, as soon as Ben reaches the island this book soars and it never loses impetus from then on. It's a thoughtful, impressive science fiction thriller.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more