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

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune ) underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

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...

Search This Blog