Titanium Noir (SF) - Nick Harkaway *****

Of all the sub-genres, arguably the two most comfortable bedfellows are gumshoe noir and dystopian science fiction. It’s part of the appeal of the movie Blade Runner, and it can be even more effective when done brilliantly in a novel like Titanium Noir. Nick Harkaway gets the whole vibe to perfection - his detective Cal Sounder has all the traits of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett protagonist, in a technological future without ever slipping into pastiche or parody.

The nearish future setting has two tiers of humanity with the ultra-rich and super-privileged few able to renew their youth, in the process becoming 'titans' - not only does the procedure fix all ills and make them young again, each time it is taken, it makes them bigger, stronger and heavier. (Harkaway mostly gets away with this despite the usual giant problem of mass going up with the cube of the person’s size while bone strength only goes up with the square - he does this by giving the titans increasingly huge bones.)

Sounder is brought in as a consultant by the police when a case involves titans because of a backstory that is gradually revealed - and we begin with a murder of one of their kind. From here, things rapidly get twisty and challenging, making for a very satisfying read. There are a couple of extremely dramatic fight scenes: I don’t know if a move in the first one is physically possible, but it’s not one I am going to forget any time soon. It may appear in several nightmares.

The whole is somehow even better than the sum of the parts - this book is perfectly crafted. I said of Harkaway’s massive doorstop of a novel Gnomon that it would have been great if only unnecessary aspects of it had been cut down. Titanium Noir has all the intrigue and cleverness of Gnomon with the unnecessary extra weight trimmed away - it is simply the best SF novel I’ve read this year. By far.

Hardback:

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

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

Deep Utopia - Nick Bostrom ***

This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. If you can picture the impact of a cross between Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach and Gaileo's Two New Sciences (at least, its conversational structure), then thrown in a touch of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , and you can get a feel for what the experience of reading it is like - bewildering with the feeling that there is something deep that you can never quite extract from it. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for his book Superintelligence in which he looked at the implications of having artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond human capabilities. In a sense, Deep Utopia is a sequel, picking out one aspect of this speculation: what life would be like for us if technology had solved all our existential problems, while (in the form of superintelligence) it had also taken away much of our appare

Search This Blog