Ascendants (SF) - Don Schechter ***

The premise here is that around 2035 technology that had been developed to understand aspects of the brain and its medical failings accidentally results in the discovery that people with a certain genetic makeup experience an afterlife, the transition to which others can witness.

The first part of the book gives us a 2060 where everything has fallen apart because of this breakthrough. Hardly anyone believes in religion anymore. There are social clashes between the few 'ascendants' who can have this transition to afterlife and the 'biomass' rest who don't. The institute behind the technology seems to operate in a quasi-governmental way.

We then take a jump back to the origins of the technology and what's really going on. Finally we return to the 2060ish present for a final reckoning. The middle section is by far the best. There is a genuinely engaging look at a startup looking for funding and how and if it should interface with the state - impressively foreshadowing real occurrences with AI.

For the rest, though, the storyline can be quite confused, and lacks characters with whom it's easy to identify. I wasn't at any point gripped or pulled into the flow of the story. And there was a more fundamental issue that the whole premise didn't seem to make sense. As presented in the blurb it seems as if there is definite evidence of an afterlife - rather as if the old spirit mediums had a scientific replacement. But all we're talking about is a vague transcendental experience that could be put down to anything. It's impossible to imagine religions and society collapsing based on little more than an immersive virtual reality experience. I can't go into the twist towards the end of the book without giving too much away - but that too seems highly unlikely.

There's something interesting going on in Ascendants - but unfortunately it seems to have lacked a decent editor to get the author to pull the whole thing apart and restructure it. As a result, it is quite hard work. All science fiction requires suspension of disbelief, but I'm afraid my disbelief spidey-sense was tingling all the way. I did enjoy much of that middle section, though, about life before the main premise kicked in.

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