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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more