A chance to reflect: several stories consider how we handle nature (Image: Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos)
TIME and space, death and hope: that about covers it, surely? If you鈥檙e looking for a little light reading for the summer, the best science writing and science fiction are 鈥� to coin a phrase 鈥� boldly going where none have yet gone.
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Published last year and nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards, Cixin Liu鈥檚 The Three-Body Problem (Tor), translated by Ken Liu, is a mix of satisfying hard-SF 鈥� those au fait with orbital mechanics won鈥檛 need to have the titular problem explained 鈥� and a fascinating glimpse inside modern China. But it is a rare novelist who can combine literary skill with properly researched hard science, and in this respect, Kim Stanley Robinson鈥檚 is streets ahead of the competition. A starship is 160 years into its voyage: two huge wheels, spun to imitate gravity, contain 12 inhabited ecosystems, from tropical forest to tundra, each with their own human population, maximised for biological diversity. We follow the ship though decades as Robinson brilliantly dramatises the action of entropy in complex systems. Crops fail; kilometre-long artificial lights die, leaving whole biomes in the freezing dark; lakes wash away their beds and start to corrode the fabric of the ship. The crew make repairs, their vessel becoming ever more of a botched job, and increasingly prone to further breakdowns. The technical challenges superbly illuminate the human dramas, and vice versa. This is science fiction at its very best.
鈥淲e follow the ship through decades. Crops fail; lights die, leaving whole biomes in the freezing dark鈥�
Australian author James Bradley鈥檚 is a beautifully written meditation on climate collapse, concentrating on three generations of an Australian family. Bradley skilfully evokes the particularity of lived experience, and the novel is full of vivid little moments, although its real triumph is in setting these in their larger context: a world wrecked by storms and floods, changes in vegetation and the collapse of bird and bee populations. The main task climate science faces is getting people to understand how serious the situation is without tipping them over into nihilism. Bradley鈥檚 short, intense novel is as much a hymn to hope as it is a warning.
is the latest example of Victor Pelevin鈥檚 unique blend of satire and SF extrapolation. The high-tech city of Byzantium floats in the sky over Urkania, its citizens entertained by specialist porn and staged wars. Down below, the Orks live primitive, exploited but more authentic lives. The satirical contrast between luxury above and poverty below is not subtle. This is an angry, funny novel, crammed with puns and wordplay. (Translator Andrew Bromfield does a bang-up job of replicating these in English.) 鈥淏yz鈥� is a distorting mirror version of the decadent West, a realm of atrophied liberalism and too much wealth. The age of consent is 46. People have sex with full-sized robot dolls, which can be any age you want. Pelevin bounces about, energetically and crudely, and fashions a gonzo delight.
Death becomes us: mortality is a popular literary theme this year (Image: Alejandro Ayala/Rex Shutterstock)
From dying societies to dying individuals. Raymond Tallis鈥檚 latest book, , opens starkly: 鈥渄eath is nothing鈥� and indeed 鈥渓ess than nothing, an omni-ravenous zero鈥�. 鈥淭hose whom we call 鈥榯he dead鈥� neither enjoy their peace nor endure their loss.鈥� Accordingly, Tallis writes his own obituary looking back rather than forward, going over the life previously lived by the corpse once known as 鈥淩T鈥�. The result is a book full of striking, thoughtful insight, defamiliarising the everyday things we all take for granted. Its prose-poetry will either delight or infuriate, and reveals an author unafraid of ending up in Private Eye鈥榮 Pseud鈥檚 Corner: 鈥渦nimpoverished psychogeography鈥�, 鈥渁 maculate pattern of warmths and coolths鈥� and 鈥渢he merely utile鈥� are a taste of what to expect. Tallis doesn鈥檛 simply stroll, he 鈥渦ndertakes set-piece ambulations鈥�. Working out at the gym 鈥渋nstantiates the essence of the burdensome鈥�. A comfy chair is 鈥渁n ergonomically friendly receptacle鈥�. In an age when books of popular science tend to adopt a chatty style halfway to dumbing down, Tallis鈥檚 commitment to his rich, difficult and estranging idiom is admirable. Or commercially suicidal. Conceivably both.
鈥淭allis鈥檚 commitment to his rich, difficult idiom is admirable. Or commercially suicidal. Conceivably both鈥�
A different approach to death informs Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz鈥檚 witty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). When Jim dies suddenly, his widow Jane is startled to discover that he signed his head over to a cryonics company called Polaris. Angry at what she sees as a desecration, she threatens litigation and tries to retrieve the head. Meanwhile, in what may be a computer simulation, post-mortem Jim is told he must shed all of his memories and loves in order to move on to his 鈥渄ebut鈥�, the passage of his connectome (鈥渢he totality of his neurological connections鈥�) into endless life. Jim finds this hard to do, and there is warmth and poignancy in the dual narratives of his and Jane鈥檚 rather different struggles to hold on to something that death has violated. At the heart of this novel is the portrait of a marriage, flawed but also loving and enduring. It is movingly done.
Kate Atkinson鈥檚 new novel really needs to be read as a companion-piece to her last, . The two together may well be the most eloquent writing about death I have ever read. In Life After Life we follow Ursula Todd as she is born, dies, is born again, and dies again, through early flu, an accident, and so on, over and over, each time lasting a little longer. Slowly, a sense of her repeating existence seeps into her mind, and she tries to direct events with the aim of saving the life of her beloved brother, Teddy, who is shot down over Berlin in a second world war bombing raid.
A God in Ruins tells the story from Teddy鈥檚 point of view: an ordinary, linear life of small satisfactions and many trivial disappointments, from childhood through war and finally into old age and his death in a care home. The narrative, like that of Kurt Vonnegut鈥檚 satirical novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), jumps restlessly from future to past, creating a deliberate, powerful flattening of the events of Teddy鈥檚 life. It all comes to a piercing conclusion as the various foci resolve into two moments: the Berlin air raid and Teddy鈥檚 impending death.
Emotionally truer than the studied pretentiousness of Tallis, more nuanced than the cartoon exaggerations of Adrian and Horowitz, it is extraordinary writing.
Six to savour
The 28 stories in China Mi茅ville鈥檚 Three Moments of an Explosion (Macmillan) are familiarly strange, full of eloquent monstrosity. A burning stag runs through a city, icebergs float over towns. Mi茅ville鈥檚 vision has a fragmentary force, and this mosaic text does it proud.
Darran Anderson鈥檚 Imaginary Cities (Influx Press) is a big, bustling book that looks at real cities through the prism of imaginary ones, from city planning to science fiction and everything in between. Anderson鈥檚 nimble study is never less than stimulating.
Joshua Cohen鈥檚 Book of Numbers (Harvill Secker) may be too tricksy for some. It is also frequently amazing, the first work of fiction to engage fully with the internet and its influence on modern living.
Claire North鈥檚 The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Orbit) recently won the John Campbell Memorial Award. Harry lives his life over and over, always the same 鈥� until he discovers others like him. By talking to those younger or older he can pass messages along to the future or the past. North builds her clever conceit into an emotionally satisfying novel.
John Higgs wrote well-received biographies of Timothy Leary and The KLF. In Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making sense of the twentieth century (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), he broadens his intellectual reach to encompass modernism, situationism, chaos theory, indeterminacy and almost every other byway of that epoch. Higgs鈥檚 plate-spinning act is a fine example of learning worn lightly.
Finally, Brian Dillon鈥檚 The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the great war, and a disaster on the Kent marshes (Penguin) tells the story of the explosion of the Faversham Gunpowder Works in 1916: safety was compromised as a result of pressure to boost production, and 200 workers were killed in a blast that shook houses as far away as Norwich. Dillon situates this story in a wider account of the Kentish landscape.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淪cience takes a vacation鈥�