Orbital (SF) - Samantha Harvey ***

This slim novel, focusing primarily on the inhabitants of the International Space Station, belongs firmly in the sub-genre of science fiction that is Lab Lit. This is SF where the science and technology is today's - some Lab Lit supporters suggest this means it isn't science fiction at all, but I happy to class it as such. The only slight extension to current knowledge is that it is set a little in the future, as one of the obsessions of the ISS astronauts is an upcoming manned moon launch, which inevitably makes them feel more than a touch inferior.

I do like the idea of these low-level astronauts feeling second rank compared with the moon landers - they are definitely in the 'bike with training wheels' class once there is some real space exploration going on. Thanks to Samantha Harvey, I can think of them as being like supermarket cola compared with the real thing (my simile, not hers). So an excellent premise. But I did find the way the book is written extremely difficult to get on with.

Frankly, it all feels more than a touch pretentious. Take the opening sentence 'Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene.' It made me feel a little queasy, with no weightlessness required. The very mannered writing style makes it difficult to identify with the characters or become engaged in the thin plot. Even when there's a good opportunity to cut down on the telling and do more showing, in a deep conversation about the Challenger disaster, it is written as reported text rather than dialogue, which dehumanises it for no good reason.

There are a couple of iffy bits of science too. The astronauts take lots of photos of a storm to help with meteorology - real ISS crew certainly do take pictures of storms, but they are pretty much valueless compared with satellite imagery for weather forecasting purposes. And the Sun is described as ‘an average star in a solar system of average everything’ - where both are actually relatively unusual.

The concept had a lot going for it, but the over-literary delivery spoiled it for me.

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

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog