‘I mean I want to explore this strangeness as rigorously as I can, and to see myself in it too.’ [loc. 676]
In Ascension won the Arthur C Clarke Award this year, and deservedly so. There are echoes of Rendezvous with Rama, and protagonist Leigh quotes Clarke's maxim that 'Any sufficiently advanced technology will appear indistinguishable from magic'. But Leigh is a (possibly neurodivergent) woman, and her experiences are much stranger than anything I recall from Golden Age SF.
The novel takes place in the near future. Leigh has grown up in the Netherlands with an abusive father, an emotionally distant mother, and her younger sister Helena, who she's tried to protect. Leigh trains as a marine biologist, and is thrilled to be part of an expedition on board the Endeavour, exploring an undersea vent in the western Atlantic. The depth readings are anomalous: one survey shows the trench as 12 kilometres deep, another triples that. And something odd happens to those who dive there: but Leigh can't remember quite what it was.
That section of the novel ends abruptly, and the story picks up a couple of years later. Leigh is working with samples from the Endeavour, trying to design a robust form of algae that will provide a sustainable food supply in space: she's been recruited to a project which plans to use astonishing new technology to send a spacecraft -- and three humans -- outwards, a million times further than any previous crewed vessel. She's bound by confidentiality agreements, so can't tell her sister -- or her mother, who is declining mentally and physically -- much about what she's doing. But the work is more important than anything else.
Leigh is a 'difficult' woman: pushing people away, unwilling to recognise her own emotions, determined not to be defined by her past. (Late in the novel there's a section from Helena's point of view, which casts some of Leigh's statements and behaviours into doubt: but I think Leigh's version of her childhood is valid and honest.) She's also the ideal person for her role, unfazed by the long hours, the repetition, the isolation, the lack of information about the mission. And above all she is a scientist, endlessly fascinated by the living world of which she is a part, endlessly surprised by and curious about her work. I learnt a great deal about many things, including archaea, cell structure, symbiosis and slime moulds (which can navigate to the nearest star).
I wasn't wholly convinced by the ending, which seems to imply a circularity of plot as well as a call-back to an argument earlier in the novel. McInnes' writing is gorgeous, the characters flawed and human and sometimes refreshingly kind, and the story itself is cosmically vast, mysterious and yet utterly rooted in the phenomenon of life on Earth. Proper wide-screen SF, without the fallbacks of monsters or warfare or colonisation, In Ascension is humane and transcendent. I'm looking forward to a reread in the next few years.
In my mind, the world is not reasonable, and can never be made reasonable. It is much more interesting than that. [loc. 280]
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