The Affirmation (SF) - Christopher Priest ****

Defining science fiction is tricky. The most obvious way this interesting novel is SF is the catchall ‘it’s by an SF author’, which is why I presume it made its way onto the SF Masterworks list. Generally acclaimed as one of the much-missed Christopher Priest’s best books, at its simplest The Affirmation can be seen as the musings of the mentally ill Peter Sinclair, whose attempt to construct a better life by writing himself a fictional autobiography gradually results in a loss of awareness of what is and isn’t real.

What makes it an exceptional novel is that its structure very cleverly takes the reader into the relationship between memory and reality, exploring what is real if memory can no longer be relied on. As such it is extremely clever and sophisticated. Where it falls down a little is in engagement with the reader.

If this book is an affirmation of anything, it’s that old storytelling distinction between showing and telling. The Affirmation is almost pure tell as Sinclair, both in his ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ life tells us what happened (or didn’t) and how he feels about it. It’s arguably essential for a novel that is entirely about how imagining and writing something down gives it a kind of reality. But it leaves the reader a touch detached at all times. One of the cover comments refers to a ‘dream-like’ quality - and it’s very difficult to get truly engaged with someone else’s dreams.

Having written the review and looking back at a couple of other reviews I’ve written of more recent Priest books (The Affirmation dates back to 1981), both for Airside and An American Story I remarked that they were only really science fiction because Priest was writing them. This may sound a negative, but actually it is for me a better approach than Iain Banks took in keeping his SF (Iain M.) and general fiction (Iain) novels entirely separate. By not making a clear distinction, Priest will hopefully have lead people who avoid SF to realise it’s far more than talking squids in space, and those who won’t read anything else to realise that literary fiction isn’t always dull and worthy.

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

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). ...

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...

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...

Search This Blog