The Coming Storm (SF) - Greg Mosse ***

It's a difficult task to write a sequel to a successful thriller and make it work as a standalone novel - sadly, this wasn't achieved well with The Coming Storm. It follows Greg Mosse's generally well received The Coming Darkness, a near future SF thriller set in a dystopian 2037 where both climate change and rampant infections have made the world a far less pleasant place and a worldwide conspiracy sets out to wreck modern civilisation.

Unfortunately, this book is way too slow to get started. Most of the first half of the book is just the three principle characters recovering from their exertions in the previous book. Admittedly there are a couple of assassination attempts, but mostly this is decidedly tedious. To make matters worse, the writing style can be a touch amateurish. In just a few pages, a characters hire car is described as a 'powerful EV saloon three times'. And some of the attempts at inner monologue are cringeworthy. For example we get the mind-numbing 'Of course, officially it was tomorrow because it was after midnight, but it was also still yesterday because she hadn't yet been to bed.'

To make matters worse, there are far too many characters introduced to keep on top of them all. As for the SF element, there are some interesting ideas, though it's hard to believe than in just 13 years climate change and new infectious diseases will have had such a severe effect on everyones' lives. There is also one big flaw in the tech - the only mobile devices seem to be next generation smartwatches, which given the limitations of both battery life and screen size seems highly unlikely. Mosse tries to get round this by giving them Star Wars-style projected holograms. But it isn't a great way to read a document... and kind of misses the reality that Star Wars is fantasy - you can't project a hologram onto empty space.

It's not all bad and I did persevere to the end. In the last few chapters we get an impressively engaging build up to a big finish. Suddenly it is tense - there is a lot at stake. And I like the way the book centres on the French secret service, rather than UK or US versions, giving it an exotic feel. Unfortunately, though, after that build-up the book doesn't have ending. I'd go as far as saying it doesn't work as a novel at all - it's like a TV filler episode between episode 1 and episode 3.

If you've not read the first book (like me), this isn't great standalone - if you have and wanted an action-packed sequel it's a big let down. The series could recover with a powerful third entry, but this addition is disappointing.

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

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...

Search This Blog