Something Coming Through (SF) - Paul McAuley *****

I have rarely been disappointed by a Paul McAuley book, so thought I would trawl his back catalogue and reaped major rewards with Something Coming Through from 2015 - this is science fiction at its best.

Set in a relatively near future after first contact with aliens, it has one of the most effective portrayal of aliens I've ever seen. Many SF aliens (think, for instance, of the majority in Star Trek) are essentially humans with some characteristic emphasised. The two alien races portrayed here both have motivations that catch you out by not working in a truly human fashion.

One set of aliens has provided 15 wormholes to distant planets where previous civilisations have existed but are now gone, along with a shuttle travelling back and forth to each destination. The relics from the other civilisations are prized, but can have strange effects on humans, something that is central to the plot. The storyline is divided into two with alternating chapters - one initially based in London featuring a young female scout for alien material, the other on one of the 15 remote planets, where the central character is an middle aged, jaded murder detective.

McAuley really throws in the kitchen sink here (in a good way) - not only do we get the interaction with aliens stuff (one aspect, surely inspired by Close Encounters of the Third Kind), there is a murder investigation, organised crime and more. It all works very effectively - and there's some very clever writing linked to the dates on the alternating viewpoints. Something I particularly enjoyed was that this a novel very much in the British tradition - it felt like the kind of thing John Wyndham would have written if he had still been around.

As it's January, it's not much to say this is the best SF book I've read this year, but I'd also says it's the best in quite a while. There was a sequel too... can't wait. (And very happy to see another, one, if you've some spare time, Paul.)

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

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

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, ...

Search This Blog