Skip to main content

Kepler 438-B: Volume 1 (SF) - The Kepler Files ***

This is a very beautiful book, though it's in an odd format that's more like a TV screen in aspect ratio. The topic is a future mission to an exoplanet, the Kepler 438-B of the title. This is a little larger than Earth, orbiting very close to its dim star. It has been proposed as a possible habitable planet, but some suggest that the level of radiation from the star would be too high for life.

Rather than present us with a conventional narrative, what we have here is a series of pages dominated by images, along with a whole range of different types of text, from interview quotes to log entries. Many of the images are stunning, AI generated with lots of detail. It's a very visual design from the Kepler Files team who, from the biographies are highly design-oriented.

The book was without doubt fun to flick through, but there is one big issue with it. This is fiction, and fiction needs to have a basis in story. What happens here is that a spacecraft is built, takes off, travels to a distant star (Kepler 438 is over 470 light years away), arrives and does a quick survey. That's all we get in the first volume. There is very little dramatic narrative. For a story to be engaging, there need to be obstacles overcome. Okay, there's the building of the huge craft (which bizarrely seems to be assembled on Earth, rather than in space) and the technology to enable faster-than-light travel (here wormhole-based) and stasis so most of the crew sleep their way to the destination - but there is no sense of anyone really making anything happen, and far too many characters are introduced to get any engagement.

There is one incident along the way (two if you count a stowaway cat) when in the agricultural zone 'Analysis of the hybrid's volatile organic compounds reveals a 58% match to known toxins' and the skeleton crew's executive officers are asked to determine next steps, but then on the next page we just get 'The threat has been contained and managed.' That's okay, then - dramatic tension or what? I can see the idea of the approach is to make it feel like a factual write up - but even non-fiction requires narrative and tension where things are overcome. And there is so little detail - for example we just get told there's 'recent development of advanced stasis technology, cryogenic stimulation and neurostimulation', and 'the hyperdrive's use of wormhole propulsion technology' - and that's about it.

Now it's possible that the drama and narrative content will build with future volumes. In the opening we are told that the information we receive forms 'part of a puzzling mosaic of information' and 'we hope the excitement that fuels this mission inspires you to join us in decoding these clues' - but as it stands at the end of volume 1, there seems very little to puzzle over and decode.

This is a genuinely original and innovative take on how to present science fiction. Innovation always comes with risk. You've got to be bold, and the team behind this book and more at the Kepler Files website (where the aim is to have more multimedia content in the future) are certainly that. But for me, beautiful though it is, taken as a science fiction book it doesn't do enough to engage me.

Hardback: At the time of review, the book is only available from the website address above, though it should be in bookshops soon.
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more