Skip to main content

Purgatory Mount (SF) - Adam Roberts ****

It's not entirely surprising that Dante's Divine Comedy should provide the inspiration for fantasy or SF - this was already the case with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1976 fantasy novel Inferno, which I remember reading in an all-night session shortly after it came out. (It was a weird night, as the hamster from my next door-but-one neighbour at university had escaped and kept appearing on the floor of my room despite a closed door, contributing to the feeling of weirdness.) Adam Roberts, as we might expect, takes a more interesting approach than simply re-writing Dante.

The book consists of three sections, apparently corresponding to the three sections of the original featuring hell, purgatory and paradise - though the parallels in the first and last section are not particularly obvious. These outer sections of Purgatory Mount, featuring a strange far future expedition discovering a vast structure that brings to mind a larger scale version of Dante's purgatory, have little real feel of storytelling. Roberts does this deliberately to reflect the lack of time in Dante's hell and paradise - it's a very effective intellectual representation, but it does get a little in the way of the book working as a novel.

The significantly longer middle section is set in a near future America as the country becomes riven with civil war. This is a second book I've read in a row where the protagonists are teenagers, though here, this develops a much stronger sense of 'us and them' between the teens and the warring adults. It's a Kafkaesque disaster story - I've never been a big fan of disaster movies or books, but Roberts makes it both graphically real feeling and gives the storyline some impressive twists. Given the state of US society, this is one of the most scarily believable apocalyptic SF narratives I've ever come across. I might not have enjoyed it too much, and I probably wouldn't read it again, but I was very impressed by it.

What was particularly effective for me is that one of the themes that Roberts addresses, apart from a wider one of atonement and sin, is the nature of mind. Having just read Philip Ball's The Book of Minds, this was particularly apposite. As is sometimes the case with Roberts' books, there's a danger of it being so clever that the cleverness gets in the way of it being a fully formed novel - it didn't seem to have the completeness of, say, The Thing Itself. But you can't complain about Purgatory Mount on its ideas or mental challenge - it does the job you expect from great science fiction faultlessly.

One final point - many people shy away from a section with the word 'acknowledgements' in the title, but I would strongly recommend reading the closing 'Afterword and Acknowledgements' pages.

Paperback:   
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

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more