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

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...

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...

Search This Blog