In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Ordinarily I couldn’t see any of this. Only through careful and deliberate study could I witness what had been in front of me all along. And so I did this, at home and at school. I remember this as a great period of visibility, the world bursting into appearance. The air was thick with teeming life, just as the oceans and the rivers were. A spoonful of seawater or a pinch of soil between your fingers held billions of living things. We were blind to this out of necessity, because if we saw what was really there we would never move. It was around us, between us, on the edge of us and inside us. It coated our bodies and we released waves of it when we breathed and spoke. It was in every skin cell and in the eyelashes that fluttered when we dreamed. It adapted to every aspect of our behaviour; if animals were shaded out, and microorganisms illuminated, then our ghosts would be clear in these bright peripheries. My favourite species were those that lay dormant in husk form before reanimating, such as the rotifers discovered in Arctic ice-sheets after 24,000 lifeless years. Able to withstand almost any force, they seemed to challenge the distinction between life and death, annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.

Won last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award, beating the Hugo-winning Some Desperate Glory and several others that I haven’t read yet. There are lots of interesting things here: protagonist is a marine biologist from an abusive family background, gets sent on a very mysterious mission to an Atlantic Ocean trench, and then on an even more mysterious space mission to the outer solar system; and then something even more mysterious happens, and we end the book trying to work out what it is. But everything is linked back and forth between the different phases of the plot, the protagonist is interesting and intriguing, and the non-human forces (I hesitate to even say ‘alien’) subtly realised.

In his acceptance speech at the Clarke ceremony, MacInnes paid tribute to Christopher Priest and said that he had learned a lot from their brief friendship. The book is not one that Chris would have ever written, but I did get the feeling that he would have enjoyed looking over MacInnes’ shoulder and giving him an approving pat on the back.

You can get it here.

One thought on “In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes

  1. If nothing else, that passage reads like it was written by a biologist so if the writer isn’t one, he can do a dashed good character voice.

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