Skip to main content

On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea (SF) - Michael Carroll ***

On the Shores forms part of a major initiative from German publisher Springer to produce books that cross over between the pure entertainment of science fiction and the more informative (if, hopefully still entertaining) genre of popular science.

I was initially somewhat baffled by this self-styled 'scientific novel' as it seemed nothing more than an old-fashioned (more on that in a moment) hard science SF novel. Then I spotted the appendix that gives the 'science behind the fiction'. This is certainly one way to get round the difficulty of incorporating too much technical exposition in a novel (one of the few examples that manages put learning in the text without making the fiction stodgy is the recent L. A. Math), but the 'science bit at the end' approach didn't work for me because the 'science part' had none of the readability of good popular science - it felt more like encyclopaedia content. I suspect many readers would give it a miss. It also stretched credibility somewhat in trying to ascribe too much science to the story - the weakest part of the plot featured unlikely mass delusions (psychically triggered at that) and to try to give this a scientific basis felt like the author was digging too hard.

So, really, what we have here is a pretty straightforward science fiction story. First the good news. This gets quite gripping about three quarters of the way through when there's a dering-do rescue attempt. And the whole thing feels quite like an Asimov story (if Asimov had realised he could have more strong female characters) - which any SF reader will realise is hardly an insult. This means that what we get is a heavily plot-driven story with genuinely clever ideas and mostly realistic science (though like all SF it sometimes has to distort the science for plot purposes, something that could have been usefully explored more in the appendix).

There is, however, bad news from this assessment too. As is common in Asimov's writing, the characters are two dimensional and the writing is businesslike but not exactly great. As a standalone novel, On the Shores would have been easily up to standard in the 50s, but when set against modern, sophisticated SF like Iain M. Banks or Adam Roberts, the writing style feels dated.

The nail in the coffin for this book is that Springer is treating it like an academic book, rather than fiction. This comes across in both the format (large pages with copyright details at the start of each chapter), and the pricing, which is twice what you'd expect to pay for a paperback SF novel (Academics may have free access to the ebook from Springer ebook deals). Sadly, then, the book is not going to be very popular as a straight piece of fiction, but equally doesn't do the job of popular science in the form of fiction. It's a great aim, but it has proved elusively difficult to make real.


Paperback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur