Skip to main content

Void (SF) - Veronica Roth ****

This is a single longish short story in Amazon's Far Reaches collection - and proved pleasantly engaging. I hadn't come across Veronica Roth before (apparently she wrote the Divergent series) but she has a light, readable style in this rather classic setting of 'working class folk on the spaceship'.

This is the home of Elton John's Rocket Man, which was very common in 1950s SF films and lasted through to Star Trek, when the writers were still essentially modelling their crews on nautical vessels, with their inevitably working class characters to do the dirty jobs. In Void, we meet Ace, one of the team who does onboard maintenance on a craft that shuttles between Earth and Proxima Centauri. She and her colleagues deal with everyday problems like malfunctioning toilets. You would probably think that by the time we can build near-light speed ships, we could also make a robot that could mend a toilet - and real life experience of space travel so far is that there is no real role for these figures, but it's a fun return to a classic concept.

Central to the plot, which is a sort of murder mystery, is the reality that because it's a near-light speed ship, the crew are travelling into the future compared to Earth, thanks to time dilation. I think Roth gets the physics a bit wrong - we're told that someone moves ahead decades in a single return trip to Proxima (rather oddly, Roth uses the shortening Centauri, which could apply to all sorts of bodies) - given a round trip is 9 light years, I can't see how the dilation can be more than 9 years - but it's a picky detail.

Like most attempts to do a murder mystery in a short story, there's not enough room to give all the twists and red herrings that really make such a tale, but Roth does a good job of exploring the life of a worker on such a ship, and the way that time dilation can mess around with their worldview. Fun.

E-book:
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...