Gnomon (SF) - Nick Harkaway ****

This massive book (more on that in a moment) split my opinion more than any other I've ever read. When I read the opening chapter, where Inspector Mielikki Neith begins her investigation of what happened when a suspect died in the mentally invasive interrogation technique of her time I was hooked. Nick Harkaway's concept of a future Britain where practically all information is available to everyone and true democracy exists, with all decisions made by the people, is beautifully realised, and he wonderfully portrays as a utopia balanced on a knife edge of plunging into dystopia.

Then I got to the next chapter, which dismayed me, as it appeared Harkaway had fallen for the irritating clichéd structure so common in modern novels of switching from chapter to chapter between different main characters and points of view, which eventually pull together. I found it tedious and just wanted to get back to Neith's story.

Soon after, I discover that things aren't what they seem, and these interlaced chapters from different viewpoints aren't set in the real world - which pulls the whole thing back to being brilliant (though I still wanted as much as possible to stick with Neith).

Having finally got through the whole thing, the Neith sections are some of the best SF I've read in years - but, for me, the interrupting sections pull the whole thing down. And it's way too long. My paperback copy was getting on for 700 pages, with ridiculously small print. I was just about okay reading the Neith sections, which are in a serif font, but the other parts are sans serif and really hard to read. It might seem a trivial point, but it didn't make reading a pleasant experience. Although those non-real-world sections have an important part to play, they could have been cut down hugely without any loss of plot - they were, frankly, very self-indulgent. Several times I almost gave up because of them - then got back to another Neith section and once more was captivated.

Overall, I'm glad I read it. The mainline sections as the Inspector struggles to understand what's going on (with a big twist at the end) and as the crime involved gets more complex are wonderful. But it could have been wonderful throughout if only those inner world, sans serif sections had been ruthlessly pruned.

Paperback:

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

Comments

I Wish They'd Taught Me That - Robin Pemantle and Julian Gould ***

Subtitled 'overlooked and omitted topics in mathematics', the obvious concern is that there is a good reason these topics are overlooked and omitted. Thankfully, this is not the case, but it's fair to say that despite attempts to dress it up that way, this isn't a recreational maths book. There's a fair description in the blurb: 'the topics which every undergraduate mathematics student "should" know, but has probably never encountered... magnificent secrets that are beautiful, useful and accessible.' As someone who many years ago did a degree with a fair amount of mathematics in it, I think it probably would have appealed back then - though to be honest a lot of it has disappeared from my memory, strongly reducing the entertainment value. Here's an example. The first real page contains the sentence: 'If you are handed a real number 𝓍 ∈ ⁠ ⁠, one way to tell if 𝓍 is rational or irrational is to look at sequences of rational numbers q n ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...

Search This Blog