The End Of The Pier Show

Peter F. Hamilton: The Chronicle of the Fallers (The Abyss Beyond Dreams/ Night Without Stars) Another month, another enormous bonkbuster from Peter F. Hamilton. Back in June I reviewed the Commonwealth Saga (Pandora’s Star/ Judas Unchained) in which the prosperous Commonwealth of human planets, all neatly linked together by railways and wormholes, is invaded by a hostile alien force whose sole goal is conquest and the elimination of all life apart from itself. Last month I reviewed the Void Trilogy in which the Black Hole at the centre of the Galaxy turns out to be a micro-universe, the Void, in which different physics applies — including telepathy — but whose consumption of energy threatens to swallow the rest of the Galaxy. The Chronicle of the Fallers is another two-volume whopper that’s a continuation, in a way, of all the others, creating a seven volume series. In The Abyss from Dreams, Nigel Sheldon — a major character from the Commonwealth Saga — infiltrates the Void in attempt to find Querencia, the planet on which much of the action of the Void Trilogy takes place. By mistake he lands on a different planet in the Void, also colonised by humans, called Bienvenido. The humans here face a constant threat from space — aliens called the Fallers who are a cross between the threads of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight novels, and zombies, who either take over humans, or eat them. On Bienvenido, a young soldier, Sivasta, obsessed with the Fallers, rises to power and becomes a kind of Marxist dictator. As a result of Nigel Sheldon’s trying to disarm the Fallers at source, Bienvenido is ejected from the Void and finds itself in real space — but circling a lonely star in the intergalactic void. Now we move to Night without Stars. This star system is a kind of sin bin in which transgressive civilisations congregate. After that I kind of lost the plot a bit, but [SPOILER ALERT] the Fallers eventually win, though not without the human population having been transferred back to the Commonwealth, with the aid of another of the Commonwealth’s star turns, genetically engineered super-sleuth Paula Myo. Often exhilarating, increasingly exhausting, my impression after reading these novels was one in which McGuffins tend to predominate over story. Hyperdrives, ultra drives, easy voyages between galaxies, weapons that destroy stars, wormhole generators, re-life, rejuvenation, accelerated development from infancy to adulthood in a month, telepathy, telekinesis, transcendence into post-physical status, sentient robots, aliens of every kind: if a character (and the characterisation is excellent) face a problem, some new gizmo should be able to help them out. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy these novels, because I did, very much. But one can have too much of a good thing.

Tom Lathan: Lost Wonders We hear a great deal about how the encroachment of humans is driving many species  to extinction. What we hear much less about is extinction at the sharp end, on a case-by-case basis. Here Tom Lathan presents ten case histories of species that have become extinct very recently, that is, in the 21st century, their demise known to the very day. The only one anyone is likely to have heard of is Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island giant tortoise of the Galapagos. Others include birds, bats, fish, snails, and a shrub. The time, energy of efforts expended by conservationists to keep the various species alive in the face of natural disasters and bureaucratic ineptitude add up to a poignant read, but in the end I was left waiting for the other shoe to drop. All the species lived on small islands or in remote, patchy habitat and would very likely have gone extinct anyway, and rather soon, whatever anyone did. Some were close relatives or even variants of other, known species, so their existence and extinction rather depended on one’s viewpoint as a taxonomist. Lathan didn’t broaden his outlook to, say, consider other threatened species that represent much deeper lineages: the tuatara, say, or the aye-aye. More importantly, he didn’t explore whether the extinction of a few species of which nobody had heard might be the thin end of the wedge. That once one starts to pull at the seemingly insignificant threads of an ecosystem, first one species goes, and then another, until the whole thing collapses. And he doesn’t address the perhaps unfashionable view that, by creating new and novel patches of habitat, and moving animals and plants around, human activity might actually have increased biological diversity. In which case the efforts of conservationists to save endangered endemics, while laudable in and of themselves, look increasingly like Canute trying to stem the tide on command. Nature is much bigger than humanity, against which the efforts of humans to demand that nature stays exactly as it is looks a lot like hubris. DISCLAIMER: An uncorrected proof of the book was sent to me by the publisher. The book will be published in November.

Lavie Tidhar: Central Station I can’t remember if I ever visited the central bus station in Tel Aviv, though it’s highly likely, given that I visited Israel in 1985 and traveled extensively round the country by bus. Like all major transport hubs, I suspect that it was and is a magnet for people of every kind, and generated its own kind of life. In Central Station, Israeli author Lavie Tidhar has inflated it into a spaceport that separates Jewish Tel Aviv from Arab Jaffa in a near-future Balkanised Israel-Palestine. People go through Central Station to reach other parts of the world via sub-orbital spaceplanes, or, via space stations, to the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt and the outer planets. The novel is less a narrative than accounts of the intertwined lives of the people born, raised, living in, working in, and passing through. The people are a stew of ethnicities, and include alien elements, people grown in labs and then forgotten about and left to grow up as street kids; and the ‘others’ who are more digital than human. There is a panoply of religions, including ones presided over by robots. There are knowingly playful references to other SF stories, and some rather good Jewish jokes (I was fond of the robot who, while invoking the Nine Billion Names of God, served as a mohel to the local Jewish community). The most poignant scenes involve the hard-bitten robotniks: human soldiers killed in battle but patched together with machinery and sent back to fight in wars that everyone has forgotten and whose results turn out, in the end, to have been meaningless. The robotniks are the beggars of Central Station who appeal not for cash, but for spare parts. They speak a dialect called Battle Yiddish (which is basically just Yiddish), different from the argot of many residents of the Station, which is Asteroid Pidgin (which is basically just Pidgin). There is overt racism, too — to a young woman who has been converted into a strigoi, a kind of bio-weapon with many characteristics of a vampire. Good science fiction (and this is very good) is not necessarily about the future, but a genre in which ordinary people are presented with extraordinary situations, thus providing a satirical or even allegorical commentary on the way we live now. Parallels with the ongoing chaos of the Middle East are not hard to find.

Lavie Tidhar: Maror People of a certain age will remember James Michener, who wrote vast blockbusters in which historical panoramas were seen through the eyes of a multi-generational cast of characters. One such was The Source (1965), telling of the Holy Land from pre-Biblical times to foundation of Israel. Maror, by Lavie Tidhar, can be seen as its antithesis. Yes, it’s a vast epic about Israel, but it is relentlessly anti-heroic. It stems from the idea that any fully rounded nation must have more than just politicians, heroes, generals, visionaries and pioneers. It must have whores, pimps, gamblers, gangsters, crooks and villains, too, and the boundaries between good and evil are not always clear. It starts with Avi Sagi, a cop so hard-boiled that he makes Dirty Harry look squeaky-clean. Assassination is Avi’s middle name, it seems, and he doesn’t question who it is he’s popping off. Avi’s story, in the early 2000s, turns out to be just the first in a series of short stories and vignettes set in Israel (or among Israelis abroad) from just after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, through the Lebanon campaigns of the 1980s, up to 2008. The stories illustrate the history of Israel but through the eyes of cops so bent they could be drawn as pretzels; drug lords who are also devoted family men; soldiers, who, once out of the army, find jobs as ‘security consultants’ (please don’t call them ‘mercenaries’) to foreign terrorist organisations; professional drug couriers; politicians and generals who are also serial rapists and embezzlers, and who take advantage of the chaos of the Middle East to indulge in what are euphemistically called ‘import-export’ businesses. There is enough blood to satisfy even the most rabid fan of Tarantino. At the heart of it all — and the only common feature of all the tales — is the mysterious, Bible-quoting Cohen, a policeman who is also a gangster, who plays both sides because, he says, if crime can’t be stopped, it has to be ‘managed’, and this means bending the rules. It turns out that Cohen was born on the day Israel achieved independence, and he can be seen as a kind of genius loci for Israel: sleeves-rolled-up, practical, cunning, doing everything to ensure Israel’s survival by any means necessary. Several real people have walk-on parts. Some, such as Chaim Topol and Ofra Haza, will be recognisable to an international readership, but there are lots more who will, I suspect, mean nothing to anyone (such as me) not steeped in Israeli popular culture. The book is not without hope, though, even if cruelly dashed. In the mid-1990s, the young and idealistic Avi, trying to put a life of petty crime behind him, and fuelled, like all his generation, by the hope of the nascent Oslo peace accords and a peace treaty with Jordan, goes to a rock festival in Arad, in the Negev desert, and makes out with a girl. It all looks lovely… until disaster strikes. This is a portrait of a real event. The collapse of security barriers led to serious injury and death for young festival-goers. In Israel, 18 July, 1995 is as much ‘The Day the Music Died’, as Altamont, or the death of Buddy Holly, are remembered in the US. And on 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, an architect of peace, was assassinated by a Jewish ultra-nationalist hothead. Avi turns back to crime and after that the course of the book is relentlessly downhill. The story ends, as it began, with Avi, and from the foregoing you’ll not be surprised to learn that it’s not a happy conclusion. To anyone like me who admires Israel, even if they don’t always love it, this novel is deeply unsettling. But I am consoled that there is a message here, too, for progressives, who rightly deplore the fact that women and minorities have to work twice as hard to achieve as much as their white, male colleagues, but, in their hypocrisy (born of deep-seated antisemitism) question the very existence of Israel, because Israelis don’t live up to ethical standards they would not match themselves, or expect in anyone else. Postscript: in Hebrew, maror refers to the ‘bitter herbs’ that are eaten at the Jewish festival of Passover in which Jews celebrate their liberation from slavery in Egypt.

Richard Fortey: Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind Richard Fortey is best known as an author (Life: An Unauthorised Biography) and palaeontologist (Trilobite!) but as his sparkling memoir A Curious Boy revealed, he’s been a skilled amateur mycologist since boyhood. Now you can go on a fungus foray without ever leaving your armchair in the company of someone who really knows his Armillarias from his Amanitas. [DISCLAIMER: I have written a longer review of this forthcoming title for a magazine].

Peter F. Hamilton: The Void Trilogy (The Dreaming Void/ The Temporal Void/ The Evolutionary Void) I started to read this years ago but it didn’t seem to make much sense, and I was put off by fantasy elements that didn’t seem to sit well with the SFnal framing. Now I know the reason — the Void Trilogy follows on pretty much directly from the Commonwealth Saga (Pandoras Star, Judas Unchained) I reviewed last month, and is best read (or, in my case, listened to) straight after. The action takes place some hundreds of years after the Commonwealth Saga. It’s been found that the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy isn’t really a black hole, but an entirely separate universe whose laws are rather different. Time flows faster, for one thing. And Commonwealth technology doesn’t really work. Instead there is … psychic power. Telepathy, telekinesis and so on. Two thousand years earlier (in Void time) a ship from the Commonwealth managed to get in  to the Void — whose barrier seemingly prevents most incursions — and lands on a planet called Querencia, where the crew and their descendants revert to a kind of medieval-grade society (with telepathy). In the greater universe, dreams of the life of Edeard, a powerful psychic from Querencia, leak out and are received by a human called Inigo, who founds a religion called Living Dream whose aim is to migrate into the Void and achieve fulfilment — at the risk of making the Void expand to consume the Galaxy. The rest of humanity aims to stop this happening. But matters are made more complicated by the fact that since Commonwealth times, humanity has split into a series of factions that either embrace or reject technology. The most techno-enthusiastic are the Accelerators who want to enter the Void as a way of jacking them up to ‘post-physical’ status, again risking Void expansion.  And there’s lots more (each one of these three volumes is enormous). Needless to say I enjoyed it hugely. The larger-than-normal amount of woo was countered by characterisation of a depth not often seen in SF. Many of the key characters carry over from the Commonwealth Saga, so we really do get invested in their fates.

John Long: The Secret History of Sharks John Long is an Australian palaeontologist interested in fossil fishes. Here he recounts the evolutionary history of sharks. Conventional wisdom has these iconic predators patrolling the seas pretty much unchanged for 400 million years. But a closer look shows that they have evolved in all sorts of interesting ways, morphing out of all the dangers and obstacles that the Earth has thrown at them. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me a pre-publication version for a cover quote].

Brian Clegg: Brainjacking Disinformation. Misinformation. Misdirection. Personal Truths. Alternative Facts. Influencers. Product placement. Deepfakes. Stage magic. Advertising. Marketing. From the dawn of advertising to modern social media, we risk drowning in floods of information designed to change our minds — such is ‘brainjacking’. Brian Clegg explains the long history of brainjacking and shows that some of the purported effects are exaggerated, whereas others really should worry us. A plain-speaking guide to our modern post-truth world. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me a pre-publication version for a cover quote].

Baoshu The Redemption of Time I generally don’t have time for fan fiction, but there’s fan fiction and fan fiction, and this one is of a superior sort. Baoshu (a pen name) is a fan, specifically of the cosmically successful Three-Body Problem trilogy by Cixian Liu (reviewed elsewhere in these pages). So much of a fan that he wrote an entire novel in the same universe, and received Cixian Liu’s blessing. The Redemption of Time will make no sense at all to anyone who hasn’t read the Three-Body trilogy, and not much more sense than that to anyone who’s seen the derivative televisual emission from Netflix but not read the books. To cut a very (very) long story short, The Redemption of Time starts with the experiences of Yun Tianming with the Trisolarans, after which he gets embroiled into an eternal cosmos-spanning war between two godlike powers — the Master and the Lurker — who fight one another by altering the dimensionality of spacetime. The Redemption of Time is (almost) as full of grand ideas as the Three-Body Problem although, given its scope, there is a lot more talk than action. Although the author cleverly ties up a few loose ends in the original, I was in the end more stupefied than edified. For diehard Three-Body fans only. Baoshu has since become an author of his own fiction, some of which features in …

Ken Liu (ed.) Broken Stars After reading Invisible Planets, Ken Liu’s selection of contemporary Chinese science fiction (reviewed last month), I discovered a second anthology, containing one or two of the same authors, with a few more, and more stories overall. This time Liu is slightly more adventurous, featuring stories that contain more specifically Chinese themes that western readers will need either extra-SFnal knowledge (and footnotes) to unpack. In culinary terms, we’re getting away from chow mein and crispy duck into those parts of the menu that are only usually written in Chinese. And it’s all the more enjoyable for all that. The highlight for me was ‘The Snow of Jinyang’, by Zhang Ran, which is an example of a trope called  chuanyue, which is a distinctively Chinese take on the anachronisms that happen when people from different times are thrown together, in this case a modern-day person in tenth-century China. There are two stories from Han Song, which can be read as political satire. Names familiar to SinoSFphiles such as Baoshu (see above) and Xia Jia can be found, as well as authors with new and different voices. I enjoyed this very much. With Invisible Planets, this book is a great introduction to the vibrant world of SF from China.

William Boyd: Restless I loved the LabLit of Brazzaville Beach. The faux-biography of Any Human Heart made my list of Best Reads last year. So notified, the younger Gees found me a few more from William Boyd for Christmas and my Birthday and this is one of those (I’m easy to buy for — books and liquorice allsorts will keep me happy). This one starts in the scorching summer of 1976 with Ruth Gilmartin, a twentysomething teacher of English as a Foreign Language living in Oxford, with a precocious five-year-old son from a disastrous relationship on the early seventies anarchist fringes of German academia. Ruth’s widowed mother Sal lives in a remote cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside and has been behaving very oddly of late. By way of explanation Sal gives Ruth a dossier — in easy-digest instalments — of a half-Russian woman called Eva Delectorskaya, born in Moscow, who was recruited to the British Secret Intelligence Services just before World War II, relating her escapades between 1938 and 1942. Eva is ‘run’ by the mysterious Lucas Romer. Ruth can hardly believe that Eva and her mother are the same person. Her mother has been living a lie all her life, and Ruth becomes part of it. But they have one final mission to accomplish. Hugely enjoyable.

Peter F. Hamilton: Pandora’s Star + Judas Unchained I was only a short way in to this audiobook when I realised I’d once read the dead-tree version. But perhaps that was all to the good — I remembered some arresting scenes from this immense SF blockbuster and was keen to revisit them. That, and the fact that I didn’t have to lift the thing, for Peter F. Hamilton tends to write at great length, and this book (with it’s sequel, Judas Unchained, basically the story’s continuation and conclusion) offered more than 70 hours of interstellar romps as I walked the dogs and did the daily round. That doesn’t mean he can’t write short stories when he wants to. I once commissioned a very short story from him, and the result, The Forever Kitten, is a delight. Reading it again now, I can see that it’s a kind of prequel to Pandora’s Star. This is a picture of humanity a few centuries hence when humans are kept forever young, and potentially immortal, by rejuvenation therapy. Those humans who can afford it, though, because society is dominated by a few ‘Grand Families’ and ‘Intersolar Dynasties’ that control what appears to be a stable plutocracy. As the story opens, humans have colonised hundreds of worlds, each linked — by railways! — through stable wormholes invented in the 21st century by two Californian techno-geeks. That’s when an astronomer on a backwater human planet spots a Dyson Sphere enclosing a faraway star. An expedition is sent to investigate, the Dyson Sphere mysteriously dematerialises, and all hell is let loose (the enclosed star is the Pandora’s box to which the title alludes). But there is a lot more to this story than that. Sure, there are enough space battles to sate the appetite of any space-opera fan, but there are also scads of sex, often taking place between impossibly beautiful people in luxurious and meticulously described interiors (Peter F. Hamilton must be the Jackie Collins of SF); lots of violent action; fabulously realised adventure sequences; suitably weird aliens; tortuous political intrigue; and a detective element that’s almost noir, featuring the genetically modified super-sleuth Paula Myo, who always gets her man, except in the one case that’s eluded her for nearly two centuries. Immersive SF fun for everyone.

Kate Atkinson: Behind The Scenes at the Museum Even if you’d never heard of Kate Atkinson (I hadn’t, until recently) you’ll have definitely come across Life after Life, her terrific and fantastical novel that featured in my best-of selection of 2021, and adapted recently as a televisual emission. Behind The Scenes at the Museum was her debut. It concerns the life of Ruby Lennox (b. 1952), born to her uncaring mother Bunty while her father George was up the pub chatting up another woman. It features flashbacks to events in Ruby’s maternal ancestry from the end of the nineteenth century when Ruby’s great-grandmother Alice runs off with a travelling French photographer, and charts the family’s ups and downs through the turbulent twentieth century. The straitened, conventional life of an ordinary Yorkshire family is presented in stark detail, especially how stifling social conventions completely drain any hope of a fulfilling life from women. Don’t think it’s dour and preachy, because it isn’t — it’s a roaring great tragicomedy, with some wonderful set-pieces, such as the family holiday in which everything that can possibly go wrong, goes wrong; and the bit-of-a-do Yorkshire wedding that happens to be held during the World Cup Final of 1966, well, goes the same way. Ruby’s narration of her mother’s life while she, Ruby, is still in the womb, reminded me of a sentence in Peter Ustinov’s autobiography Dear Me that has a similarly in utero perspective. ‘I went to visit my mother’s gynaecologist’, he wrote. ‘My mother came with me as I was too young to go on my own’. Behind The Scenes has the same humour, sparkling wit, deft phrasing, and  rewarding richness.

Ken Liu (ed.) Invisible Planets Hungry as I am for more SF from China, and with birthday requests on the table, Mrs Gee ordered me this collection of contemporary Chinese SF, edited and translated by Ken Liu. Thirteen stories, all by authors of whom news had yet to reach mes oreilles. All except, of course, Cixin Liu, author of the extraordinarily successful Three-Body Problem trilogy (reviewed here and here). Liu (sensu Cixin) is an author of two of the stories here, and one of the three essays on Chinese SF, its genesis and current reach, that end the book. The question one wishes to ask — indeed, it is asked in this book — is just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? what is it that makes Chinese SF so distinctive, so Chinese? It’s a rather hard question to answer. For a start, the selection of stories here ranges from the gritty, grubby cyberpunk of Chen Qiufan to the fantasy of Xia Jia and Cheng Jingbo and the 1984-style dystopia of Ma Boyong. My favourite was Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang, reminiscent in its tone and subject of Golden-Age stories by the likes of Heinlein or Asimov, but with its own distinctive flavour. From this, the only answer seems trite: Chinese SF is like any other SF, except that it is written from a perspective that’s, well, Chinese. I suspect, though, that such differences as there are might not be readily appreciable to western audiences. The stories are, after all, presented in translation, and selected by an editor who is quite candid, in his introduction, that some stories didn’t make the cut because their concerns were so rooted in Chinese cultural and political preoccupations that they couldn’t be presented without many burdensome footnotes. So it could be that what we see here as distinctively Chinese SF is as authentically Chinese as the food served in most so-called Chinese restaurants in England. That is, selected for its appeal to western palates rather than being truly representative. To appreciate Chinese SF, then — to truly appreciate it — one has, I suspect, to be not only a fluent reader of Chinese, but conversant with every tic and nuance of a culture thousands of years old which, in the past century or so, has undergone a series of truly seismic changes. Like Borges’ character Pierre Menard, who wished to read Don Quixote as it was meant to be read, one would. have to become, effectively, Cervantes. These stories brought home to me, rather starkly, that writing is more than print on a page, but only comes alive in the mind of the reader. And each reader, each one lonely in their lighthouse steeple, will take different things away from the same stories. Not to be discouraged, though, I shall be moving on to the companion birthday present — Broken Stars, a follow-up anthology of more Chinese SF stories, also edited by Ken Liu. I am looking forward to that.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Ruin BEWARE There are spiders spoilers spiders octopods octopuses cephalopods. This is the sequel to Children of Time, reviewed last month. In that novel, human arkship Gilgamesh comes into contact with a planet, Kern’s World, which, due to sabotage (and an honest mistake) during the terraforming process, became home to a species of sentient spider. Here, a different terraforming team, on the spaceship Aegean, meets a  system with two planets. The first, Damascus, a barren water world, is terraformed and successfully colonised by sentient octopuses bred by the crew. The second, Nod, contains the first truly alien life ever encountered by humans, though at first it seems of a very lowly kind. The human expedition, though, becomes host to a kind of sentient plague that has brooded on the planet for aeons, waiting for just this moment. Centuries later, a combined human-spider expedition from Kern’s world that reaches the Nod-Damascus system has to grapple with not only the plague but the enraged cephalopods fearful that the new humans have come to unleash the plague upon them. But just as humans and spiders have achieved some level of mutual understanding, they both have to learn an unfathomable new language, the protean and emotive communications of the octopuses. This novel is a lot of fun, though with the added octopuses adds a layer of complexity that can sometimes drag on an already complex plot. It doesn’t have the wonderful sense of development that the first book has — perhaps because Tchaikovsky has already demonstrated his fluency, his ability to get inside the minds of other species, riffing entertainingly on philosopher Nagel’s question of what it must like to be a bat.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Memory Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality. But I digress. This is the third volume in the trilogy that began with Children of Time (reviewed last month) and Children of Ruin (above). By this time in the time-stream, the humans, the spiders from Kern’s world and the octopuses from Damascus have formed a single, post-scarcity civilisation, glued together by the (now tamed) sentient plague from Nod. Consciousness can be uploaded into multiple lab-grown bodies, and people of one species can present themselves as individuals of another. Death has been abolished. An expedition from this multipartite civilisation reaches Imir, one of the worlds targeted for terraforming by the ‘ancients’ before the Old Earth was ravaged by war. Imir hosts a colony of post-war humans who had arrived on the arkship Enkidu. Unfortunately, the terraformers had left Imir before the job had hardly started, so the colonists are forced to live an increasingly desperate, hardscrabble existence. The expedition of protean squidspiderpeople decides not to confront the colonists directly, but infiltrate their way into their society. When they do, it becomes apparent that All Is Not Right. People keep popping up in unexpected places and times, in particular Heorest Holt — erstwhile captain of the Enkidu and First Founder — and his grand-daughter Liff. Something very strange is going on. This wouldn’t be a Children of Earth novel without another intelligent species, and in Children of Memory it is a kind of raven. The ravens come from another hardly-terraformed planet and have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. The ravens tend to come in male-female pairs, and the ones we meet here are Gothi and Gethli, who, when they work together, are expert problem-solvers. At first, Gothi and Gethli seem to be comic relief, but as the book goes on you realise that they are central to the plot, and their commentary on the action, insightful, and often funny (there are references to the Dead Parrot Sketch), holds the key to the major theme of the book. Where Children of Ruin was all about communication, Children of Memory is all  about the shifting nature of sentience, one’s sense of self, and how this is tied in with memory (the clue is in the title). Gothi and Gethli conclude that they themselves are not sentient, and, therefore, nothing else can be. What a burden it would be, one of them says, if you had to think all the time. I smiled at this, as the evanescence of sentience was the punchline in a book of mine, The Accidental Species. In my view, most people go happily throughout life without being sentient. And that’s okay, because too much sentience is pathological, seen only in young people whose prefrontal cortices are wiring up, or those with some forms of mental illness. There are more clues in the names — Tchaikovsky has so much fun with names. His spiders generally have Shakespearean names — Portia, Bianca, Viola — and there is always an octopus called Paul. Some might remember an octopus of that name renowned for seemingly being able to predict the result of international football matches. The ravens were originally nurtured by a human called Renee Pepper, a name that seems to me suspiciously close to Irene Pepperberg, a pioneer researcher into bird cognition. There is a strong Nordic element in the names of the colonists of Imir. The name for the planet itself comes from Norse mythology, and Gothi and Gethli are obvious re-castings of Odin’s ravens Huginn (‘Thought’) and Muninn (‘Memory’). The arkships have names that come from one of the earliest known myths, the Gilgamesh story, and there are parallels between events in that story and the fates of the arkships Gilgamesh and Enkidu, if one cares to look. Children of Memory is a deep, thoughtful book, and does occasionally tie itself in knots (I haven’t even mentioned the sub-plots that discuss whether our Universe might be a simulation) but carried (at least for me) a powerful emotional impact. The trilogy as a whole is one of those reading experiences  that inspires thought, and will remain long in the memory.

Tom Chivers: Everything is Predictable Two backpackers are lost. Wandering along a country lane, they meet a farmer idly leaning on a gate, chewing a grass stalk. ‘Please Sir’, asks one of the hapless pair, ‘How do we get to Cromer?’ ‘Well’, says the farmer, thoughtfully, ‘I wouldn’t start from here’. But I digress. Many years ago when the world was young I penned a polemic that attracted many fruitbrickbats. Among the many things that attracted the ire of the hip and fashionable was the assertion that, in science, no matter how many fancy schmancy statistics you use, you’ll always end up with an estimate of probability that something or another is true, and after that you’re on your own. I was accused of being something called a ‘frequentist’, and that was among the more polite epithets. I have since learned that there is a better way of doing statistics, and that relies on something called Bayes’ Theorem, and the people who do statistics that way are called Bayesians. To this day I have never really understood Bayes’ Theorem, and have, frankly, been deterred from learning by the fanatical adherence to their creed of its devotees (fanaticism of any kind being something of a turn-off). Imagine my delight when my good friend Mr. B. C. of Swindon reviewed the book currently under discussion — a guide to Bayes’ theorem and an explanation of what the fuss was all about. Buoyed up by his stellar review I bought the book, imagining that the skies would clear, the scales would fall from my eyes, I would experience a Damascene Conversion, and then run naked through the streets of Cromer shouting ‘Eureka’. (Nobody would mind. They are used to such things in Cromer). Well, it wasn’t quite like that. I did learn a lot, but I am still rather confused. Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected this to be a how-to book, with problems and worked examples (such books do exist). It’s more of a history of a concept. However, as Chivers helpfully repeats throughout the book, frequentist statistics (I do hate these ‘-ists’ and ‘-isms’, I prefer to think of it as ‘the statistics I was taught’) says that you set up a hypothesis, gather some data, and ask ‘how likely are we to see these data, given the hypothesis I’ve set up?’ Bayesian statistics starts with the data, and ask which hypothesis it best supports. The crucial difference between the two is that Bayesian statistics starts with what’s called a ‘prior’ — that is, an idea based on what you already know,  against which you test your data, and if the mismatch is unacceptably large, you add the new data into the pot and stir it round again, converging on a solution. If, for example, you are trying to work out the probability that a hypothesis might be true, there is no need to go in blindly. Instead, you can arm yourself with already established knowledge. So my hapless pair trying to get to Cromer mightn’t have to ask the farmer at all if they have a map, a GPS, or have just seen a sign saying ‘CROMER 2 MILES’. In a way, Bayesian statistics is the application of common sense. It is essential in things like drug trials, as Chivers explains. It has revolutionised work in evolutionary biology, my main concern in my day job (by day I’m with the Submerged Log Company), particularly the computation of evolutionary trees. Rather than put the genomes or observed traits of a whole load of fish and fowl into a computer and have to decide between the zillions of possible solutions that emerge, you can start by saying that you know from copious previous evidence that fish aren’t fowl and whales are not insects that live on bananas, therefore discarding a lot of no-hoper solutions and can home in more quickly on the most plausible evolutionary tree. Chivers doesn’t say anything about evolutionary trees, though he does discuss the history of Bayes and of statistics as a whole (very interesting) and bangs on at some length about how the brain is a Bayesian machine and that Bayes, like Love, is All Around (rather tedious). Although he discusses the enormous controversies that Bayesian statistics stokes, he doesn’t really explain (to my satisfaction, but then I have a large posterior) why the fury is so, well, furious. So I am not sure I really learned a great deal more about Bayesian statistics than I knew before, and I certainly can’t carry in my head (yet) a succinct explanation of why it’s better than good old-fashioned statistics, for all that he repeats the mantra throughout. It’s a diverting book, but perhaps I’ll have to get one of those how-to guides with problems to work through and answers at the back of the book. This book is fun, for certain definitions of ‘fun’, but as the farmer said, I wouldn’t start from here.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: The Doors of Eden BEWARE there are spoilers monsters spoilers gigantic sentient space-faring trilobites! WHEEE!!! Mal and Lee are a couple of misfits whose shared passions are cryptozoology and each other. Hiking on Bodmin Moor in search of monsters, they encounter a ring of standing stones and find themselves in another world. So far, so Outlander. There follows an overstuffed sofa farrago adventure that involves speculative palaeontology, dimension-hopping Neanderthals, dinosaur bird-people, M.I.5, sentient ice minds, the inner workings of the City of London, warlike rat-weasels (in airships — gotta have airships), a very sweary transsexual super-genius, and even a James-Bond-style supervillain. This is a rich mixture that’s rather too intense for my fevered brain to cope with. There are too many times when some character asks where they are, or what’s going on, only for their interlocutor to respond with something gnomic. And far, far more F-bombs than necessary. Enjoyable — but exhausting.

Billy Connolly: Rambling Man Only two comedians have made me laugh to a state of helplessness. One was Jo Brand, and it was after she said this: ‘The underwear you want people to see is black. And the size of an atom. The underwear you don’t want people to see is grey … and the size of Buckinghamshire’. Okay, I guess it’s the way you tell it. I can’t remember precisely what it was that Billy Connolly said to make me laugh so hard I almost krupled my blutzon, but after the high-octane SF of Adrian Tchaikovsky I needed something a bit lighter for my daily walks. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which I enjoyed reading consuming listening to this memoir through my ear holes, narrated by the man himself. The Big Yin is now in his eighties and not quite as furiously frenetic as he once was, but his memoirs of his travels from the tropics to the arctic are, if not eye-wateringly hilarious, then never less than amusing, and sometimes moving. After that I downloaded one of his live shows to listen to, and it was great fun, but I now realise that a lot of Connolly’s humour was visual as much as verbal. He really did throw himself around, back in the day.

Philip Ball: How Life Works ITEM:When Sir Dudley Marjoribanks, later Second Baron Tweedmouth, set out to develop the perfect dog for retrieving the carcasses of ducks shot over water and bringing them undamaged to the hunter, he crossed a throw-rug with a garbage disposal unit water spaniel with a flat-coated retriever and the golden retriever was born. I grew up with a golden retriever, and have kept three myself. All golden retrievers love water, and nothing better than to present people, at moments of occasion or arousal, with a plush toy or item of soft furnishing held gently in the mouth. And yet none of these dogs was trained to the gun, with ducks. The dogs just do it spontaneously. But nowhere, I suspect, in the genome of the golden retriever is a gene that encodes this behaviour. It must be somewhere, in the neural wiring of the brain,  but that’s not encoded in the genome either. At some level, the tendency of retrievers to retrieve is an emergent property of all the genes, cells, tissues and organs that make up the dog, when they are all put together and sent off into the field, tails wagging.

ITEM: The Gees have been enjoying a reality TV show called Race Across The World in which teams of couples have to get from a point A to a point B, thousands of kilometres and several countries apart, entirely by surface transport, with a budget equivalent to the air fare, and without smartphones or credit or debit cards. In the latest series, twenty-something brother-and-sister Betty and James Mukherjee got most of the way through when Betty admitted to her brother (and therefore the public) that she had been diagnosed with a condition called Mayer Rokitansky Küster Hauser syndrome (MRKH), in which she was born without a uterus, and also one of her kidneys. MRKH is a congenital defect that results from the imperfect formation of the the tubular, embryonic structure from which forms parts of the urogenital system. This structure forms when two sheets of mesoderm (another embryonic tissue) meet and fuse in two parallel strands on either side of the developing body. There is no known cause for MRKH. Searches for mutant genes connected with the condition that are found in common in all MRKH cases have been in vain. And that’s to be expected: MRKH is the result of tissue movements — actions of whole sheets of cells — that might be contingent on mechanical and environmental factors as much as genes. What doesn’t excite comment, as perhaps it should, is that Betty and other MRKH patients are otherwise perfectly normal, intelligent and fully functional human beings, able to communicate their state and their emotional response to it, despite the absence of key internal organs. If development were under total genetic control, with each step in the process dependent on the successful completion of the one before, people with MRKH, or any other developmental quirk, would not be born. But because development is rather loose, and tolerates a degree of variation as it goes on, people are nonetheless born and live their lives with a variety of syndromes. As I have argued in a book called Jacob’s Ladder: The History of the Human Genome, such variation is the price we pay so any of us can be born at all.

ITEM: When Offspring#1 had aspirations to study medicine, and, ultimately, surgery [SPOILER: he got better] he wondered how it was that people could wander around full of thoughts and dreams and hopes and motivations and aspirations but inside they looked like wet lasagne. Where did all those thoughts, dreams, hopes and so on and so forth come from? Where, in that mass of goo and squish, is the person who prefers (say) cats to dogs; is rather good at maths despite their own expectations; is a passionate player of Dungeons and Dragons; will eat a whole packet of liquorice allsorts at one sitting; and supports Norwich City FC?  As with the tendency of retrievers to retrieve, all are emergent properties, There are no genes that encode a tendency to support Norwich City FC as opposed to, say Ipswich Town FC Accrington Stanley. But this raises another issue. Retrieving in dogs, however it is determined, is inherent. Supporting one football team or another, in contrast, demands a degree of choice. It requires something called agency.

Enter science writer Philip Ball with this magisterial account of the workings of genes, cells and bodies. It is, first of all, an antidote to the gene-centric view of evolution, in which genes are ‘libraries’ or ‘blueprints’ or ‘programs’ for creating a body out of nothing, and all else is commentary. It turns out that genes are rather less, or more, or. well, something or other, it’s actually really hard to explain, and that’s because it’s almost impossible to describe what goes on at the scale of atoms and molecules without recourse to metaphor. It’s often been a cause of some wonder to me how molecules in cells can do what they do when they are packed in so tightly, and all surrounded by water that cannot possibly behave as a bulk fluid. How can molecules meet and interact in the way they seem to do in all those neat diagrams seen in textbooks and (I have to say) scientific papers, when the viscosity regime must be rather like treacle? Such misgivings have similarly long preoccupied Ball, who is trained in physics and chemistry rather than biology, and can appreciate problems that biologists might miss. He  puts it very well when he says that the insides of cells are less like factory floors than dance floors, crowded with excited dancers packed in together and jiggling about and unable to communicate with one another because of all the noise. In such conditions, how can JAK kinase possibly get to JIL kinase across such a crowded room, in order to — well, let’s just think of something, oh, I don’t know, Release Calcium from Intracellular Stores? The intracellular environment is noisy, and very far from favouring the kind of neat networks and diagrams in which abbreviations cleanly interact with other abbreviations. Rather, says Ball, cells make a virtue of the noise and disorder. Molecular interactions are much less precise, much more fleeting, than one might imagine, and tolerate a degree of slop that no engineer would possibly countenance. Because of that disorder, the interactions between the various levels in the rough hierarchy of scales from genes to proteins to cells to tissues to organs to organisms are not always clear. But order emerges from the melee, nonetheless.

If that’s all there was to How Life Works, it would be a good book. What makes it a great book is that Ball unflinchingly tackles the really big question — what is the nature of life? What makes a living thing alive? What is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? What is the nature of that vis essentialis,  pneuma, je ne sais quoi, that animates a bag full of wet lasagne? It’s here that Ball gets into challenging and exciting territory. Remember, some few paragraphs ago, I talked about agency? Ball suggests that organisms are living because they make active choices. We can choose whether or not to eat a third bagel (you’ve had four, actually, but who’s counting?). A golden retriever can choose, and often does, whether or not to chase that thrown ball.  A living bacterium can sense the presence of nutrients, and actively move towards them. A dead one cannot. At the most basic level, a cell membrane can admit the passage of some ions, but not others, even against a concentration gradient — Maxwell’s Demon, made (in some sense) real. In the deepest philosophical sense, life is that which gives an assembly of atoms meaning. Given the difficulties of describing the biochemical and cellular processes of life without recourse to metaphor, some will find this hard to take. There is also the issue (which Ball deftly navigates) in which biologists are afraid to use terms such as ‘agency’ and ‘purpose’ for fear of invoking teleological or panglossian explanations, or, worse, welcoming a role for divine intervention. No such things are necessary — yet living things are definitely alive, and conventional prescriptions for the properties of life that we are taught in school (that it reproduces, grows, excretes, blah blah blah) fail to satisfy, and, being that this is biology, are plagued with viruses exceptions.

As I was reading How Life Works, I was reminded of Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What Is Life? subtitled The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, in which the famous physicist attempted to tackle the essential problem of biology. What Is Life? was part of a movement in which physicists became enamoured of biology and, having done so, boosted it into the molecular age (Francis Crick was one such). Not long after I had that thought, Ball obligingly discussed What Is Life?, its deficiencies, successes and influence. Ball, like Schrödinger, is also a physicist, and can therefore take a more dispassionate view of biology than those who labour in the trenches. How Life Works is What Is Life? for the 21st century, and, because we know so much more than people did in Schrödinger’s time, is more successful (that the title doesn’t end in a question mark is an Important Clue). How Life Works should be required reading for anyone thinking of taking a degree in biology, and if it doesn’t get at least shortlisted for the next Royal Society Science Book Prize, I shall have been a giraffe on a unicycle [DISCLAIMER: Ball is a personal friend and former colleague — we worked together, back in the day, at the Submerged Log Company — though my copy was given to me as a birthday present by Mrs Gee, who paid real money].