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

Comments

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 ...

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...

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...